Reflections

Today race and racial relationships seem in my personal opinion to be blwon way out of proportion. Technically I account for two minority groups and I have never felt that I was one because, everywhere I go I see other black people and I see other women, thus why feel outnumbered. Yet in still I do not ignore the fact that our currrent society is arranged in a way that best suits the majority first and almost every other minortiy group except African Americans. Americans as a race of people are naturally lazy and are used to the mircrowave effect and want things to happen for them qucik fast and in a hurry. I for one have been victim of these notions, but never have I fell to the assumption that I am owed anything because of my race or my gender. I have no hold no bbeliefs for racial superiority,  however I do think that tend to have more privileges and opportunities that other, but the just reflects on the social captital policy. Its also so apparent that some just tend to have more amiable qualities, or have been able to manipulate the system to better benefit them (George W. Bush), while others have not. The thing with the African American community is that several of them grow to believe as their elders did that the “white man” will never allow them to make anything of themselves because of their past racial relationships, thus they figure why bother striving for greatness. The general concept of the white man keeping the black man down and yet you see so many people of color accomplishing major milestones in today’s society. Another reason why African Americans have been the least successful at manipulating society is due to the fact that some feel as if the government owes them for the sufferings of their ancestors, the depend to heavily on government assistance rather than using it to further themselves and consider it the very least that “white people” can do. I am unaware of the mindsets of other minority groups and only have insight into this one through experience. Even I at one time felt that I could only go sop far and only have a specifc type of job when I grew up, and it would be the type of jobs that I seen black women have on Tv (cooks, hairstylist, secretaries,teachers,coaches and etc). Eventually one has to let go of all other preconcieved notion about themselves, their race, their potential and abilities to motivate themselves to do whatever they want to do or become whom ever they want to be. Despite any level of discrimination that minorities have been forced to endure or the sentiment of race superiority implied by the media, it is the responisiblity of society as a whole to recoginize that we are all American and its our differences that make us that way.

Popular Art and Racism: Embeding Racial Stereotype in the American Mindset

Jim Crow and Popular Culture Aritcle

Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D.

The onset of Jim Crow laws and customs rested upon the racist characterization of black people as culturally, personally, and biologically inferior. This image functioned as the racial bedrock of American popular culture after 1900, especially manifested in minstrel shows, the vaudeville theatre, songs and music, film and radio, and commercial advertising. So pervasive was the racial demeaning of black people, and so accepted was it by white Americans throughout the nation, that blackness became synonymous with silliness, deprivation, and ignorance. Most white Americans believed that all Africans and their descendants were racially inferior to whites, and that their common inferiority tied them together wherever they might live in the modern world.

In America, black people were portrayed as inferior almost from the time of their enslavement in the colonies in the 1620s. This racial characterization enabled white masters to justify slavery as something positive. Using racial stereotypes to justify the enslavement of blacks was especially pronounced after 1830 as white Southerners defended slavery against attacks by northern abolitionists.

This historic view of blacks became deeply embedded in American popular culture with the emergence of the minstrel show in the 1840s. By 1900, the image of silly and exaggerated black men and women in comic routines was the mainstay of musical acts, songs, and skits that dominated the theatrical scene in America well into the twentieth century. (For further discussion of the relationship of Jim Crow and minstrel shows, see Creating Jim Crow, In-Depth Essay.

The image of black people in the white mind focused on outrageous depictions of individual blacks and their assumed cultural practices. Countless representations of impoverished blacks with ink-black skin, large thick red lips, and bulging eyeballs appeared almost everywhere in the public arena. Dozens of graphic artists and illustrators prospered as racial commercial artists by drawing such images to sell products and to illustrate show bills and magazines. Most prominent was Edward W. Kemble, whose racist illustrations were notorious in America and Europe, including his 1896 “classic,” Kemble’s Coons.

Perhaps, the most popular of all the Jim Crow industries by 1900 was the sheet music field, which made the derogatory word “coon” a part of everyday language. The black American Vaudeville performer and composer, Ernest Hogan, did more than anyone else, ironically, to popularize the so-called “coon” craze and racist characterization of blacks. His wildly popular 1896 song, “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” appeared, usually illustrated with the images of ridiculously dressed black men and women, on billboards and sheet music all over the nation.

At the same time, as Jim Crow music, dance, theatre, and illustrations distorted the image of black Americans; a wave of racially driven commercial advertising flooded the landscape. Most popular were the racist trading or advertisement cards that used the outrageous images of black people to sell everything from yeast to furniture, pillows, fertilizers, hardware, cigars, breakfast food, and tobacco. Of these cards, racist advertisements that depicted a Mammy-like black woman (Aunt Jemima) selling pancakes were, perhaps, most popular. The silly “Gold Dust Twins,” who performed as half-dressed, house-cleaning pickaninnies dispensing commercial washing powder, were also especially popular. Everywhere one turned were brightly colored and skillfully drawn images of big-eyed and thick-lipped blacks eating corn, sporting fanciful attire and riding a wild pig or some other farm animal, aping white elites to comic effect, trying to ice skate, clumsily walking along a high fashion boulevard, haplessly trying to ride horses in the manner of an English gentleman, and strutting proudly in exaggerated dress at parties and “darkey” balls. And soon, the images became products themselves–racist dolls and Mammy-style metal banks flooded the consumer market as children’s toys. By 1900, so accepted was the popular concept of black inferiority that racist brand names, such as “Niggerhead,” began to appear—usually selling some aspect of blackness, such as ink or dye.

This outpouring of images, performances, and music was supported by a largely racist or else highly romanticized literary tradition. The novels and writings of Joel Chandler Harris, especially his Uncle Remus tales, written from 1888 through 1906, looked back at the days of plantation slavery as a time of racial harmony in which happy and simple-minded blacks lived with respect and dignity as slaves.

Thomas Nelson Page, whose early novels and short stories, usually narrated by elderly freedmen, portrayed, like Harris, a tranquil life in slavery where faithful blacks adored their masters and were cared for with affection and tenderness. By 1898, Page had turned bitter, however, and began depicting blacks as sinister characters that could not be trusted in freedom. No author was more racist or more popular than Thomas Dixon, whose novel, The Clansman, published in 1905, blamed all of the South’s woes on the inferior blacks who roamed the land unchecked following their emancipation.

When film and radio burst onto the American scene in the new century, the racial stereotypes were easily adapted and strengthened in these revolutionary forms of popular culture. Radio captured the imaginations of millions of passive listeners who tuned in for broadcasts of the Amos and Andy shows–the most popular radio show in America in the 1930s. Rooted in the old minstrel shows and blackfaced vaudeville acts, the program portrayed two southern black men who had moved to Chicago. Its characters of the Kingfish, a dishonest and lazy confidence man who massacred the English language by mispronouncing words, and Sapphire, his loud, abrasive, bossy, and emasculating wife, became permanent fixtures in the minds of white Americans. The program dominated radio in the 1930s and 1940s, and played as a popular television show in the 1950s.

Like radio, Hollywood films also presented blacks within the context of images from the minstrel shows and vaudeville. Usually, blacks were presented as faithful and often wise or hapless servants, resolute and devoted Mammy-type characters, and often stupid and silly chicken stealing blacks. Many of the classic film landmarks of American culture featured such stereotypical portrayals of African Americans. These films included such classics as Birth of a Nation (1915), The Jazz Singer (1927), which was the first sound film, Gone with the Wind (1939), the most popular film of all time, and the sentimental Song of the South (1946), an animated film produced by Walt Disney and based upon the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris.

Birth of a Nation was truly a product of its times when it hit the nation’s movie houses in 1915. It fused the two most basic racial themes of the Jim Crow South, demonstrating the close link between the two: the minstrel show and lynching. And, in the latter case, it greatly strengthened the racist image of black men as beasts who lusted after innocent white women and girls. The film, which was the blockbuster of its day, raking in over $200 million dollars from its debut in 1915 to the mid-1920s, launched a wave of “Negrophobia,” which is the fear of and/or contempt for black people and their culture. After viewing this film, many white males honestly worried about leaving their wives and children at home alone out of fear that black beasts lurked in the shadows all around. In some communities, after seeing the film, the whites randomly attacked and beat any blacks they found on the streets. The movie helped revive the long dead Ku Klux Klan and inspired a new wave of white supremacy in the 1920s.

Most “Southern Films,” although far less viciously anti-black than Birth of a Nation, played, nevertheless, to the white supremacy convictions of most Americans. Continuously voted the most popular film of all times whenever surveys are made, the epic Gone with the Wind, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, presented a range of black characters who exemplified various aspects of the accepted racial stereotypes. Although the black actresses Mattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen brilliantly played the Mammy character and the witless house servant, both women were barred from the week’s events surrounding the Atlanta premier of the film in 1939. McDaniel, who went on to be the first African American to win an Oscar for her performance as the strong and resolute Mammy, was viewed by white audiences as a loyal and faithful servant which was an acceptable black image.

And McQueen, who had starred in dozens of black theatrical performances during the Harlem Renaissance, displayed a genuine comic talent in ways that sadly supported the racist views of blacks as incompetent people. Her performance, along with those of the popular black actors Stepin Fetchet, who portrayed a lazy, whining, clown-like character in numerous films in the 1930s and 1940s, and Billy “Bo Jangles” Robinson, the tap dancing house servant in several Shirley Temple films in the 1930s, continued the long line of racial characterizations stretching from the minstrel shows through vaudeville and radio.

At the same time that black stereotypes and racist characterizations dominated the popular culture of white supremacy, significant contrasts did exist and provided refuge for black Americans. The Harlem and Chicago Renaissance movements in literature and the arts of the 1920s presented richly creative and genuine black achievements in contrast to the popular images of white supremacy.

In film, for example, over 200 “race movies” were produced between 1915 and 1945. Most of these films countered the stereotypical images of blacks, presenting them instead as doctors, lawyers, soldiers, cowboys, gangsters, and men and women of character. Most importantly, they featured all-black casts. Three Oscar Micheaux films were among the best of these: Within Our Gates (1920), which presents the lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta; The Brute (1920), which is the story of a black man standing up to a lynch mob; and Birthright (1939), which tells of a black Ivy League man who returns to the South after college. In the white mainstream, moreover, the popular musical, Show Boat, featuring the great black actor and singer, Paul Robeson, was one of the first films to show black people as strong and complex men and women victimized by racism in America.

Still, images of blacks as lazy, thieving, conniving people; hapless or faithfully devoted servants; or dangerously sex-crazed beasts dominated the media during the Jim Crow era. The accepted racial stereotypes supported a racist America in which lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, disfranchisement, and segregation ruled the land. At a sold out charity benefit during the premier of Gone With the Wind in Atlanta in 1939, local promoters recruited blacks to sing in a “slave choir” on the steps of a white-columned plantation mansion built for the event. Among the local African Americans in the choir was a young black man dressed as a slave who made his first appearance that evening in the national spotlight. His name was Martin Luther King, Jr.

Selected Secondary Sources:

Bernardi, Daniel. ed. The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of the U. S. Cinema. New

Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York, New York: Continuum, 1989.

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. ______. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. 1971. Reprint, Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. New York, New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York, New York. Oxford University Press, 1977.

Litwack, Leon F. Troubled In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

O’Connor, John E. and Jackson, Martin A. eds. American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York, New York: Continuum, 1988.

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. White on Black: Images of African and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991.

Powell, Richard J. Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

The Sound of Silence: Talking Race in Music Education

Deborah Bradley

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Raciology: the lore that brings the virtual realities of “race” to dismal and destructive life

Gilroy 2000 (p. 11)

Introduction: Social Justice or Colonialism

Although general education has focused attention in this direction for some time, it seems that the concept of social justice may finally have become a topic of widespread interest within music education, signaled by the International Conference on Music Education, Equity, and Social Justice held in October 2006 at Teacher’s College, Columbia University in New York City. I say “finally” because the concerns are not new. Issues of social justice have lurked in the academic margins of music education for quite some time. Nearly two decades have passed since Roberta Lamb and Julia Koza brought feminist critiques of music education philosophy and practice into its discourse. The concerns they raised about gender bias in choral (Koza 1993a, 1993b), instrumental and general music education settings (Koza 1992; Lamb 1994a; Lamb 1987) and feminist critiques of music education philosophy (Gould 1994; Koza 1994a, 1994b; Lamb 1994b; Lamb 1996; Morton 1994) motivated me to think more deeply about what it means to teach music. The issues raised in their work, as well as an increasing understanding of music’s sociality (Bowman 1994a, 1994b) piqued the curiosity that eventually became my scholarly focus on issues of multiculturalism and racial politics. The reasons for my turn toward anti-racism as a discursive lens for analysis will be addressed later in this paper, but my use of this lens is by no means a rejection of feminist ideals. I continue to find inspiration in the work of scholars whose analytic views might be characterized as “feminist” (Gould 2005; Jorgensen 1996, 2003; Koza 2001, 2003; O’Toole 1994, 2005) and whose writings address the ways music education reproduces unequal power relations through practices that are often exclusionary.

Although concerns about issues of power and hegemony have been explored vigorously, both in print and at conferences in recent years (at MayDay Colloquia, in this Bradley, D. (2007) “The sounds of silence: Talking race in music education” Action, Criticism, and Theory for journal, and elsewhere), little seems to have changed in the way music is taught in schools and other settings. Where changes have occurred, they have been largely isolated and associated with individual initiatives. The Teacher’s College conference themes of social justice and equity in music education suggest, then, that the discipline may be willing to reflect upon itself more intently and critically. While I take heart that music educators are beginning to give social justice the serious consideration it deserves and to discuss ways of integrating social justice theory more effectively into teaching praxis, I am also concerned that despite the best of intentions many of us have not considered adequately what social justice means and entails. I worry that social justice may become simply a “topic du jour” in music education, a phrase easily cited and repeated without careful examination of the assumptions and actions it implicates. That can lead to serious misunderstandings. Social justice may, for instance, be misconstrued as an act of charity: classes study and perform music from another culture, viewed through a lens that suggests the people of that culture somehow need “rescuing,” and resulting in a perceived need to “do something” that leads in turn to the donation of concert proceeds to some related cause.

Charitable organizations do good work in the world, but they do not by and large create the widespread change that diminishes or eliminates the need for their existence. (If societies were socially just, there would be little if any need for such organizations.) For this reason, I suggest that the “do something” motivation among some music educators leads to what I consider acts of charity posing as social justice. While the educational process that leads to such motivation may raise student and audience awareness of social justice issues, the status quo remains intact, and the participants often come away feeling self-satisfied, even pleased about their sense of social responsibility. In best-case scenarios, such experiences may eventually lead to greater self-reflexivity on the issues. But what if the experience is an endpoint rather than a beginning? In a recent article entitled Stealing the Pain of Others, Razack(2007) argues that movies like Hotel Rwanda often make (white) audiences feel good about themselves through an affirmation of individual and national capacities for compassion associated with a sense of moral superiority. I believe the same argument might be made about many musical performances directed towards charitable fund-raising: They often leave students, teachers, and audiences feeling good by affirming individual and collective capacities for compassion. But these capacities and feelings often stem from, and reinforce, an unacknowledged and deeply problematic sense of moral superiority.

Presumed moral superiority served to justify colonial conquests and their related brutalities. To view other cultures or people through the lens of moral superiority reiterates these colonialist power relations within North American educational systems:

Colonialism, read as imposition and domination, did not end with the return of political sovereignty to colonized people or nation states. Colonialism is not dead. Indeed, colonialism and re-colonizing projects today manifest themselves in variegated ways (e.g. the different ways knowledges get produced and receive validation within schools, the particular experiences of students that get counted as [in]valid and the identities that receive recognition and response from school authorities) (Dei & Kempf 2006, p. 2).

Colonialism is alive and well, I fear, within many North American music education programs. Our music education curricula continue to validate and recognize particular (white) bodies, to give passing nods to a token few “others,” and to invalidate many more through omission. The western musical canon predominates our curricula, while we continue to argue whether popular music should have a place in what our students learn, and which styles of popular music are “appropriate.” Musical practices from around the world remain marginalized as curricular add-ons, if acknowledged at all.

The results are visible when we take a serious reflexive look at who participates, and who does not, in typical school music programs. In my local area public school district, which I believe is not atypical in the U.S.A., ensembles at the elementary level are diverse, since participation in music is required for all students. At K-5 levels, the student population is approximately 51 percent white, 10 percent Asian, and 24 percent African-American. Hispanic students comprise 15 percent of all elementary level students, and Native Americans less than 1 percent. However, in middle school the demographics begin to change, and by grade twelve, 70 percent of the total high school student enrollment is white. Only 15 percent of the total population of high school students participates in any of the fine arts course offerings.1 Of this total, 64 percent are white. The picture becomes even more disturbing when other measurements are used. In grade twelve, only 13 percent of students enrolled in fine arts are from low income families, and only 4 percent of high school fine arts students are considered to be special education students, while only 1 percent of students participating in the fine arts in high school are ELL students (English language learners).2 If we look closely, we may recognize that there is much about our profession that begs examination of its possible role in perpetuating inequities, racial inequities among them.

What constitutes social justice in education?

How do we begin to make changes within music education that seek out, encourage, and validate the contributions of all people in our schools and communities and in the world at large? In doing so, how might we move beyond isolated acts of charity that pass for social justice and reiterate colonialist attitudes of moral superiority towards others? I submit that the transformation of music education as/for social justice requires intensive reflection on our individual and collective beliefs and practices. While there are a number of areas where inequities exist in music education, my remarks in this paper will focus on race and racism since this is where I most often direct my scholarly attention. Before addressing race and racism as issues of social justice specifically, though, I want to frame the discussion with two related general concepts of social justice. Since social justice is a concept that means different things to different people—there are, as Griffiths observes, a “diversity of understandings, even though some of the differences are serious, even bitter” (Griffiths 1998, p. 4)—my intention in offering these definitions is neither to foreclose debate nor to exclude other alternative possibilities. But I hope, through a brief discussion of these two definitions, to orient the reader to ways of thinking that open the space for what follows in this paper: a discussion of anti-racism, white privilege, and the difficulty many white people experience talking about race. If we can overcome the taboo about naming race in discussion, and begin to talk more knowledgeably and confidently about racial issues, we can begin to make our music education praxes more racially equitable and socially just.

To begin the discussion, I will look at Connell’s concept of social justice in education, which he describes as “taking the standpoint of the least advantaged.…[U]nderstanding the real relationships and processes that generate advantage and disadvantage is essential in evaluating the practical consequences of any action that claims to embody the interests of the least advantaged” (Connell 1989, p. 125). Connell’s definition needs to be problematized, as does any attempt to provide an overarching definition for as complex and multifacted a concept as social justice. I introduce this quotation acknowledging its inherent tensions:  they are precisely those that, left unexamined, reiterate the colonial power relations that educating for social justice ought to disrupt. Who are the “least advantaged” to which Connell refers? Who decides what counts as advantage and disadvantage? These are questions of power and privilege—indeed, of white privilege—embedded within the academic discursive requirements to label and define (Ellsworth 1997), requirements considered integral to credible scholarship. I offer this broad definition of social justice primarily because of the process Connell outlines: to evaluate the practical consequences of any action that claims to embody the interests of the “least advantaged.” Such claims are precarious, and Connell’s suggestion to evaluate their practical consequences implies the need for our actions, as well as our discourse, to be self-reflexive. Taking the standpoint of the least advantaged is not a call to “speak for” or “act for” (positions that reinscribe colonialism) but a call to stand alongside: to speak with and act with in ways that require reciprocity and collaboration. This approach has its roots in anti-hierarchical traditions of thought, based upon the fact that “ordinary people do not need an intellectual vanguard to help them to speak or to tell them what to say” (C.L.R. James, cited in Gilroy 1993, p. 79).

Griffiths (1998) offers a definition of social justice similar to Connell’s: “Social justice is what is good for the common interest, where that is taken to include the good of each and also the good of all, in an acknowledgement that one depends on the other. The good depends on there being a right distribution of benefits and responsibilities” (p. 102). Here, too, the question who decides what is in the common interest may be read as problematic, since the ability to make such decisions usually resides with those who hold power—in government, in school boards, in classrooms, in academic research. Griffiths also acknowledges that reciprocity and interdependency are key concerns for social justice. As she writes in the early pages of Educational Research for Social Justice, concerns for social justice are more about processes than outcomes. Social justice is characterized by continual checks and adjustments to the situation at hand and is never static (p. 12). The reflexivity implied by the checks and adjustments is one way to mitigate power relations and allow for the “right distribution,” both of the benefits and the responsibilities that characterize socially just education.

Terms such as “least advantaged” and “common good” are indicative of the way academic discourse reproduces institutionalized whiteness, which I will address later in the paper. While such terms may be read as patriarchal or suggestive of a “god’s eye view,” it is also possible to read them as inclusive and fluid. For example, who the “least advantaged” are depends upon context. In some cases the least advantaged may be students of color in classrooms that seek to impose invisible (white) norms. In other situations girls and women may hold the least advantage, and in still others students’ sexual orientations may determine advantage. The least advantaged might be second-language learners in schools, students with learning disabilities, physical challenges, and so forth. In all situations, relative advantage and disadvantage are determined by the intersection of oppressions like race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and ability. Acknowledging the intersections of oppressions3 is crucial to anti-racism, and is one of the main reasons I utilize this perspective in my scholarly endeavors. For my work, anti-racism provides a useful way of interrogating how the “common good” is construed in educational practice.

Anti-racism as a discursive framework for social justice in music education

As a lens for analysis of oppressions within an educational agenda for social justice, antiracism provides a discursive framework4 for questioning the roles of societal institutions including school, home and family, museums, the arts, justice, and the media in reproducing inequalities of race, gender, and ability (Dei 2000, p. 34). Recently, anti-racism discourse has also engaged in interrogation of ultra-nationalism as a form of (racist) oppression (Gilroy 2004), and oppressions based upon language, or linguistic racism (Amin & Dei 2006). While sharing much terrain with other anti-oppression discourses, including feminism, anti-racism approaches the intersectionality of oppressions, maintaining the saliency of race in analysis. Anti-racism examines issues of equity (understood as the qualitative value of justice), the need for multiple voices and perspectives in the production of knowledge (representation), and the ways institutions respond to challenges of diversity and difference as the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, language, culture and religion (Dei 2000, p. 34).

Many North American music education programs exclude in vast numbers students who do not embody Euroamerican ideals. One way to begin making music education programs more socially just is to make them more inclusive. For that to happen, we need to develop programs that actively take the standpoint of the least advantaged, and work toward a common good that seeks to undermine hierarchies of advantage and disadvantage. And that, in turn, requires the ability to discuss race directly and meaningfully. Such discussions afford valuable opportunities to confront and evaluate the practical consequences of our actions as music educators. It is only through such conversations, Connell argues, that we come to understand “the real relationships and processes that generate advantage and disadvantage” (p. 125). Unfortunately, these are also conversations many white educators find uncomfortable and prefer to avoid.

White educators’ reluctance or inability to discuss race is, I assert, part of the very process that maintains systems of advantage and disadvantage within music education. In order to break down this system, the racially dominant need to learn, as Howard (2006) puts it, to “articulate their accountability and experiences of grappling with whiteness” (p. 59). This must go further than the detached rational discussions common to critical academic writing, which create possibilities for individuals positioned as white to find an “out.” Rather, Howard argues, each individual member of the racially dominant group must “openly grapple with his/her own implication in whiteness” (p. 59).

In grappling with my own whiteness within the context of this essay, I acknowledge both the irony and the complexity of power relations implicated by my attempts, as a white scholar, to explore race and racism in ways that go beyond “detached rational discussion.” I am well aware that writing about whiteness will not undo my white privilege—indeed, in many respects it serves to uphold it. As Thompson (2003) suggests, writing about whiteness redounds to whites’ benefit institutionally, politically and morally, in that whites get “credit” for such work. “Perhaps in a few years,” she writes, “we will know better how to talk about whiteness in academia without reinscribing all the instrumentalities of academic whiteness, but for the moment, we are still building the tools we need to build antiracist tools” (p. 9). The effort to bring the topic of race into music education will, I hope, be viewed as one such tool. I make this effort not as a way to reinforce my own white privilege (although it inevitably does), but as a means to “probe the silences around various racisms” (Dei 2006, p.15). Dei states,

The most important question today is not who can do critical race work or antiracist work, but rather, whether we are all prepared to assume the risk of doing so. Not everyone who speaks about race is heard. In fact, racial minority bodies speak race all the time but are heard differently. . . . In order for certain issues about the experiences of racism to be accepted in public consciousness, they must be raised by a dominant body (p. 15, italics in original).

As stated previously, one goal for this essay is to articulate some of the reasons we who identify as racially white find discussions involving the naming of race difficult to engage in, even when all the participants in the conversation are committed to issues of social justice. My intent is to interrogate whiteness within music education, including my own implications in white privilege. In what follows, I will look at two related issues: the socialization that makes conversational “race talk” unacceptable in “polite company”, and the institutionalization of whiteness that influences what we are able to say and write in academic settings. If we can understand, through theory, that the taboo surrounding race talk is part of a process of maintaining advantage in a white supremacist system, perhaps we may ultimately find the courage to talk openly, and begin to dismantle the system that disadvantages so many.

By targeting “race” specifically, there is a risk that my words may seem to ignore or erase other oppressions. I believe that is a risk worth taking, however, since there is danger in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression (Moraga & Anzaldúa 1981, p. 32), and because race is a “social construct with powerful social and political implications that has been muted . . . or pitted against other subjectivities—particularly class and gender—to render it ‘undiscussable’ as a difference or a site of struggle” (Ladson-Billings 1996, p. 249). My intent is not to occlude other forms of oppression; neither is it to place them in opposition to concerns for racial equity. Rather, my goal is to bring “race” into relief within the variety of discussions and approaches that a socially just music education might entail.

If, as Ladson-Billings (1996), Gilroy (2000), Williams (1997), Dei (2000), and other scholars assert, race is socially constructed, it does not “really” exist in a biological sense. Why, then, are we so reluctant to talk about it—to introduce serious discussions of race and racial issues into music education? My hope here is that by analyzing that reluctance, we may begin to move music education’s newfound concern for social justice beyond its current, naïve state—a state in which we persist in using “language that ignores its own partiality, that refuses to engage the ideological assumptions that underlie its vision of the future, and that appears unable to understand its own complicity with those social relations that subjugate, infantilize, and corrupt” (Giroux & Simon 1989, p. viii).

Many, or perhaps most, current music education practices in North America make little or no attempt to take the standpoint of those least advantaged. In fact, programs based on the western canon are constructed on precisely the opposite premise: the standpoint of those with the greatest advantage. In the great majority of cases, music teachers and students are white and affluent. To name race in discussions of music education not only invokes discomfort, then, it raises tacit fears that if we de-center the western canon in music education to acknowledge and engage in forms of music making that are more culturally relevant to our students, our race-based positions of advantage may be compromised. As Gilroy (1993) has argued, “the recent history of black musics which, produced out of the racial slavery which made modern western civilization possible, now dominate its popular cultures” (p. 80).5 Might the collective reluctance of North American music educators to embrace popular and world musics express an unconscious fear of losing the white privilege represented by canonic knowledge and expertise?

Avoiding the “R Word”

Talking about race can be risky business. As Morrison (1992) notes, avoiding the mention of race in conversation is often considered a graceful, liberal gesture (p. 10), yet it is at the same time a gesture that discredits difference. Attempts to focus deliberately on issues related to race as a named concept go against whites’ socialization. Researchers have noted that among white students in anti-racism classrooms, naming race in conversation often results in wandering “off topic”6 as a means of avoiding discomfort. Such avoidance behavior has been identified as “a diversion strategy”:

We have found that White students frequently use diversion strategies when discussing race. We have seen White female students divert the conversation to a discussion of feminist issues, White gay and lesbian students equate racism with homophobia, and students with body types that do not fit the cultural norm turn their attention to weight issues (Rich & Cargile 2004, p. 360).

Granted, this tendency may help white students develop empathy with the victims of racism as well as gain some insight into the way various oppressions intersect with race. But at the same time, as Rich and Cargile argue, it reveals the discomfort many whites experience when race is the specific focus of discussion. I too have witnessed similar diversion strategies among music educators, including some that are uniquely “musical.” One such discussion in which I took part (at a MayDay Group colloquium) began by exploring the ways race may be embedded as code within the idea of multicultural music education but soon became diverted to, among other things, a discussion of the future (sustainability) of marching bands. While the discussion of marching bands implicated concepts of whiteness, no one named the concept or addressed race specifically. When I pointed out these diversions during subsequent discussion, one person commented that she “did not know how to talk about race.” Her statement met with affirmative head nods, indicating to me that others in the room shared  similar concerns. This is a common phenomenon. In Colormute, an ethnography focusing on “race talk” in a California school system, Pollock (2004) states:

[A]ll of the educators I talked to—teachers, teachers in training, school coaches, principals-to-be, superintendents—requested that I provide a more specific guide to how to talk racially in school settings. They argued that they themselves ‘lacked the language’ to talk successfully about race, as racial language was itself loaded, difficult, incredibly hard to make ‘positive.’ One superintendent said succinctly that she felt ‘handicapped by language’ that was always ‘woefully inadequate’ (p. 220, italics in original).

This “handicap by language” is not surprising given that, “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled . . . discourse. Evasion has fostered another, substitute language in which the issues are encoded, foreclosing open debate” (Morrison 1992, p. 9). One of the “substitute languages” for race about which I have written is the one known as multiculturalism (Bradley 2006b), a language that comes into play within music education whenever we encounter musics that lie outside the Western art tradition. This act of sorting into musical bins labeled “western” and “other” implies a “multicultural unity . . . promulgating a generic or homogenizing term which would cover all non-white others” (Bannerji 2000, p. 29). It is also, I suggest, one of the things that makes specifically naming race difficult in multicultural discourses.

Although in the United States it is common to use the term multiculturalism to refer to both liberal forms of multiculturalism and to describe critical multicultural pedagogies, in Canada, Great Britain, Australia, and other areas, anti-racism refers to those enactments of multiculturalism grounded in critical theory and pedagogy. The term anti-racism makes a greater distinction, in my opinion, between the liberal and critical paradigms of multiculturalism, and is one of the reasons I find the anti-racism literature useful for analyzing multiculturalism in music education. The primary differences between (liberal) multiculturalism and anti-racism are described by Dei (2000):

[M]ulticulturalism works with the notion of our basic humanness and downplays inequities of difference by accentuating shared commonalities. . . . Anti-racism shifts the talk away from tolerance of diversity to the pointed notion of difference and power. It sees race and racism as central to how we claim, occupy and defend spaces. The task of anti-racism is to identify, challenge and change the values, structures and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism and other forms of societal oppressions (p. 21).

While I believe that as educators, we have an obligation to teach in ways that encourage change within individuals’ thoughts and actions, multiculturalism’s discourse of shared commonalities allows for easy slippage away from naming race in discussions of difference, relying instead upon the language of “culture,” “ethnicity,” “nationality,” or the peculiarly Canadian language of “visible minorities” (Bannerji 2000)—a term specifically denounced by the United Nations in March 2007 as racist. Yet “it is clear to most anti-racist educators that racialized minorities experiencing a deracialized approach to schooling feel the material consequences of race profoundly” (Dei 2000, p. 20). Race is a fiction that masquerades as reality with great success. Hence, my interest in anti-racism education seeks to maintain race and racial issues as a salient focus, and insists that talk about race be explicit, not covert or implied. However, in making race explicit in our conversations, it is crucial to recognize and avoid “the power of race talk that resides in the making and experiencing of the ‘Other’ and the creation of Othered subjects” (Dei & Kempf 2006, p. 9). Racism is not just about skin color; it is about how we use power to engage issues of language, sexual orientation, class, gender, ability, religious and ethnic oppressions (p. 17).

Breaking the silence: Why it is important to talk about race

If white educators lack the language to discuss adequately a concept that is often dismissed as a “fantastic fiction,” why should we worry? The idea that we do not talk about race is itself a “fantastic fiction”—the use of coded language and euphemisms such as “poverty problem,” “welfare,” “crime problem,” “urban schools,” and even “diversity” and “multiculturalism” routinely find their way into everyday speech, including the public speech of teachers. These codes are “a back-handed way of talking about what we believe is a ‘race problem’ ” (Landsman 2001, p. xi), a “problem” that in large part has been linked directly to presumed failures of public education. We know the alarming statistics, and although estimates vary among the many studies related to minority student achievement, one common denominator is the wide disparity in graduation rates from high school of white and minority students, particularly in the United States and Canada. In an American study based on the class of 2002, about 78% of white students graduated from high school with a regular diploma, compared to 56% of African-American students and 52% of Hispanic students (Greene & Winters 2005, p. 1). Of the students who completed high school in 2002, “only 23 percent of African-American students and 20 percent of Hispanic students left school ‘college-ready,’ compared with 40 percent of white students” (p. 1).

The demographics of schools in North America are changing quickly. By some estimates, 40 percent of students in the United States are of color (Landsman 2001, p. ix). Yet as the number of students of color increases, the percentage of teachers of color is shrinking. At present, teachers of color make up only about 10 percent (p. x) of the total number of teachers. With statistics suggesting that only just more than half of African-American and Hispanic students who enter high school actually graduate, the magnitude of the issue is readily apparent. Public education is a racialized endeavor that gives advantage to white students, despite so-called multicultural efforts to make the curriculum more diverse and culturally relevant to changing student populations.

If we believe that our responsibility as music educators is to do more than provide musical training (Bowman 2002), and that a critical pedagogy is crucial to education (as differentiated from training), then it follows that race and racial inequality must become issues to which we music educators speak directly, rather than through code. DeNora (2000) posits music “as taking the lead in the world-clarification, world-building process of meaning making” (p. 44); it is, she asserts, “a resource to which actors can be seen to turn for the project of constituting the self, and for the emotional, memory, and biographical work that such a project entails” (p. 45). If DeNora is correct in these assertions, then these acts of meaning making can surely be deployed in ways that bring the racialized system of white advantage into clearer focus. Once this picture becomes clear, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the raciology—“the lore that brings the virtual realities of ‘race’ to dismal and destructive life” (Gilroy 2000, p. 11)—at work within music education. Practices that ignore musical traditions outside of the western canon, or that incorporate a few select traditions merely as exotic add-ons, perpetuate raciology and racism.

Taking the risk of talking about race is important both for the future of music education as a discipline, and for our students who look to us for guidance on their journeys to becoming music educators. Until we are able to break the silence that maintains music education’s complicity in perpetuating racism by leaving whiteness the undisturbed and undisputed cultural norm, our concerns about social justice in music education will amount to little more than lip service.

Discredited Difference, Implicit Associations

The incorporation of race into music education discourse in recent decades has often taken the form of a standardized “laundry list” that is appended to the ends of sentences: for example, the assertion that “we must remain conscious of all forms of oppression including those based upon gender, race, ability, etc.” While this is an advance from writing that ignores sites of oppression altogether, the laundry list does little to help us think about how racialized concepts of music are embedded in our actions as music educators. This may be a direct result of the way white people are socialized to avoid discussion of race overtly. As I mentioned earlier, we have developed coded language to evade talk about race in polite company. When those codes are put aside in favor of direct talk, Morrison (1992) observes, “tremors” break out, a situation “further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture. To notice is to recognize an already discredited difference” (pp. 9–10).

Morrison’s last sentence is telling. Why are differences based upon skin color considered discrediting and thus an unfit topic for discussion in polite company?7 Why do we avoid confronting issues of race directly, instead opting for a discursive dance of conversational code words? Landsman (2001) offers the following explanation:

Many of us, in many walks of life, are nervous talking about race. We are so often afraid we will say the wrong thing, and so we say nothing. We become quiet, defensive, ashamed, or unwilling to respond. We pretend the racial differences do not exist; we are all alike under the skin, aren’t we? Thus, we do not acknowledge the experiences of people of color, precisely because of their skin—black, brown, yellow, or white, dark or light (p. xi, italics in original).

The fear of “saying the wrong thing” is for many people actually a fear of being labeled “racist” for speaking openly about race. “One anthropologist has described the ‘fear of being labeled a racist’ as ‘perhaps one of the most effective behavioral and verbal restraints in the United States today’ ” (Van Den Berghe, cited in Pollock 2004, p. 2). Yet the ongoing discursive dance around the “r word” sometimes creates strange situations that illustrate how our avoidance of race talk perpetuates racism within education. Patricia Williams (1997) tells the story of her son, who had been labeled “color-blind” by three different teachers in his nursery school. She took her son to an ophthalmologist for testing, only to be told his ability to discern color was “normal” for a child of his age. Her investigations into this misunderstanding brought out the paradox of “color-blind” attitudes towards race. Her son had decided that naming colors was unimportant—in fact, he adamantly refused to name colors—because he had heard repeatedly in school that “it doesn’t matter if you are black or white or red or green or blue.” Yet the very reason his teachers had begun reciting this colorblind litany was in response to a playground scenario in which children had been fighting over whether or not black people could play the “good guys” (p. 3). While the child’s misunderstanding makes an amusing anecdote, it is a story that suggests how raciology finds its way into educational settings even for children in nursery school. Williams’ son’s literal (and quite age-appropriate) interpretation of his nursery school teachers’ litanies resulted in his acquisition of a deficit label. Had she not intervened in this case, her son might have been set on the path to join “the disproportionate numbers of black children who end up in special education or who are written off as failures” (p. 5). The over-representation of students of color among those who have been identified as learning-disabled is among the concerns that lead to minority students’ disengagements from school (Dei, James, James-Wilson, Karumanchery, & Zine 2000, p. 9). I wonder if the same behavior exhibited by a white three-year old might result in that child being labeled as color-blind. I suspect that a white child refusing to name colors in response to the “it doesn’t matter” mantra would be cited as evidence of the absence of racism in the nursery school, rather than an acknowledgement of its presence.

When university students or participants in anti-racism workshops claim that racism no longer exists or that it has no material impact on their lives, hooks (2003) conducts a simple exercise. She asks the class to write down on a piece of paper their response to a hypothetical scenario: if they were to die and come back to life, what identity would they choose: white male, white female, black female, or black male? “Each time I do this exercise, most individuals, irrespective of gender or race invariably choose whiteness, and most often white maleness. Black females are the least chosen” (p. 26). hooks then asks students what prompts their choices. She explains that most offer a “sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race (with perspectives that take gender and class into consideration).” She describes this disconnect between the “conscious repudiation of race as a marker and their unconscious understanding” as a gap that must be bridged before meaningful discussions of race and racism can take place. hooks describes this exercise as a way to help students move past denial of racism’s existence and to begin their work towards more unbiased approaches to knowledge (p. 26).

The gap between conscious repudiation and unconscious understandings of race, even when recognized, may be difficult to bridge. Gladwell (2005) discusses the disconcerting results of the Implicit Association Test or IAT8 for racial prejudice. The test operates on word and image associations. Images of white people are paired with the word “good” or other positive attributes; images of black people are paired with words suggesting “bad” or negative attributes in what is termed the stereotype congruent test. Response times for the various paired words are calculated. Then the test is reversed (stereotype non-congruent test): formerly positive images are paired with negative attributes and vice-versa. Because researchers realized the order in which tests were administered affects results in some cases, they controlled for item order.

In the majority of tests taken by white participants, the response times for the stereotype non-congruent test increase significantly, suggesting that many white people, even those who do not consider themselves to be racist, have difficulty breaking associations of white with good and black with bad. Thus the association of black with “bad” unconsciously influences how we talk about race, and, may I suggest, influences opinions about “other people’s musics.” If researchers developed an Implicit Association Test based upon genres of music such as hip-hop, Afro-pop, and Bollywood—contrasted with European classical music—would response times reveal similar racially-influenced response sets?

The frequently replicated IAT results for race are discouraging in their implication that even with conscious effort, it is difficult to unlearn white supremacist thinking. hooks (2003), however, denies emphatically and equivocally that this it so. She claims,

[T]his false assumption gained momentum because there has been no collective demonstration on the part of masses of white people that they are ready to end race-based domination, especially when it comes to the everyday manifestation of White-supremacist thinking, of white power (p. 40).

It is difficult to begin the work of ending race-based domination if we cannot talk about race without discomfort, anxiety, or fear of reprisal. The silence among whites on issues of race speaks volumes. In recent years, white academics have begun to think and write about race. Many have done so in support of colleagues of color, yet this support is frequently criticized both by scholars of color and white scholars. Thinking about race and racism in some circles carries the stigma of “dirty work” best left to black folks and other people of color. Some see it as a form of “acting out” for privileged white folks (hooks 2003, p. 27).

While hooks sincerely commends white scholars and anti-racism activists who understand why they have made the choice to be anti-racist, she is concerned that white people who do anti-racism work tend to be represented as “patrons, as superior civilized beings” (p. 27). The result is that activists are “typecast, excluded, placed lower on the food chain in the existing white-supremacist system” (p. 27). The “can’t win” box created by such arguments reinforces the difficulty of breaking through the discomfort associated with discussing race, both in academic discourse and daily conversation. This “double bind of whiteness” (Ellsworth 1997) works against meaningful dialogue about race in many disciplines, including music education. Still, as Dei reminds us, the important question is not who can do anti-racist work, but whether we are all prepared to assume the risk of doing so (Amin & Dei 2006, p. 15).

Institutionalized Whiteness

While I agree with hooks that it is possible for whites who are motivated to overcome their racist socialization, I also believe that anti-racist efforts must concurrently focus on systemic change. Bland forms of multicultural education will not in and of themselves overturn institutionalized whiteness, or what hooks calls white supremacist thinking. Systemic change, however, is painfully slow and difficult. Institutions of higher education resist change by exerting pressures—sometimes tacit, sometimes overt—that suppress dissenting voices and talk about disparities based upon race. It is one of the ways that power operates within institutions. As Foucault (1978) explains in The History of Sexuality:

Power is essentially what dictates its law . . . Power prescribes an “order” . . . that operates . . . as a form of intelligibility . . . . Power acts by laying down the rule: power’s hold . . . is maintained through language, or rather through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law (p. 83).

This concept of power as productive, as “the operation of political technologies throughout the social body”(Dreyfus & Rabinow 1983, p. 185), suggests that “whiteness, like all ‘colors,’ is being manufactured, in part, through institutional arrangements” that create and enforce racial meanings, co-producing whiteness alongside blackness and other colors in symbiotic relationship (Fine 1997, p. 58).

Fine and her colleagues conducted a study in a prominent law school from which dropouts were rare. They surveyed first, second, and third year law students’ beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. The data related to attitude revealed vast differences among first year students in political perspective, levels of alienation, and vision for the future when analyzed by both race and gender. By year three, however, the differences were barely discernible, indicating a process of “professional socialization” whereby the law students grew anesthetized to things that as first year law students they had considered outrageous (such as sexist jokes). “First-year women reported concerns with the issues of social justice and social problems, and even dismay at the use of the generic ‘he.’ By year three their political attitudes were akin to the white men’s (p. 61). This anesthetization was not without personal cost. Students’ suppression of critical dispositions manifested itself apparent in “lowered grades, worsened mental health, and conservatized politics for white women, and women and men of color” (p. 61). The climate of whiteness in the law school created self-doubt for students of color, as one black woman explained:

I don’t know, maybe I’m just paranoid or something. And I wonder how people are perceiving that . . . I get the sense that maybe people won’t listen to me as much as if I were a white person saying it. And then people, when they do listen to me, they say, ‘well of course she’s going to say that, because she’s thinking of her own self-interest’ (p. 61).

I wonder what a similar study focused on music teacher education might find. I have had conversations with music education students who told me they were discouraged by their applied music teachers from pursuing interests such as a world percussion ensemble,10 or outside activities like music theatre, so that they could devote more time and attention to Western classical music, a genre in which they were told they were “deficient.” The result of such institutional disciplining is that the very students who might seek to become proficient in more varied forms of music making, and who might subsequently bring these alternative perspectives into their classrooms, are discouraged and sometimes barred from doing so. Upon graduation from teacher education programs, they feel qualified only to teach the canon. One of my graduate students recently made the following comment in his course journal:

Curse the music school that has not prepared me in anything other than the replication of “high” “art” “music”!!! How can I be a musician and not ever have heard Paul Simon and the Graceland album! I feel angry at my narrow musical training.

The narrow focus on Western art music found in many university music programs maintains the institution’s focus on white culture. The lack of substantive change in postsecondary music programs (despite profound changes in the school population that music teacher graduates will serve) assures the reproduction of whiteness within music education. Bourdieu’s (1991) description of the “magic” effects of “institution” provide insight into one of the ways that universities produce and reproduce whiteness by discouraging change.

Despite his use of gendered language, I believe Bourdieu’s point regarding institutional disciplining speaks directly to the ways that music education students come to believe that music of the European canon is superior, and thus the most (indeed, in some cases, the only) music appropriate for educational purposes:

The act of institution is thus an act of communication, but of a particular kind: it signifies to someone what his [sic] identity is, but in a way that both expresses it to him and imposes it on him by expressing it in front of everyone . . . and thus informing him in an authoritative manner of what he is and what he must be (p. 121, italics in original).

‘Become what you are’: that is the principle behind the performative magic of all acts of institution . . . . That is also the function of all magical boundaries (whether the boundary between masculine and feminine, or between those selected and those rejected by the educational system): to stop those who are inside, on the right side of the line, from leaving, demeaning or down-grading themselves. This is also one of the functions of the act of institution: to discourage permanently any attempt to cross the line, to transgress, desert, or quit (p. 122, italics in original).

Music education students enter universities from diverse backgrounds that include musical experiences in “subaltern” musical practices (rock bands, music theatre, hip hop, and other genres). After four years or so in the institutional environment, we send them out to the world somehow convinced that what they ought to be teaching is the Western canon. We generally accomplish this without directives and without conversations about the reproduction of cultural norms within the university experience. Programs hold up one model as the exemplar for inclusion in elementary and high school curricula. Students graduate and enter the teaching profession able to talk about or teach little else. Once in their own classrooms, the curricula they implement create two groups of students: those who buy into the cultural norms implicit in their curriculum, and those who opt out of school music. Those who disengage from school music often fail to see themselves as musical or musically “literate” (Joyce 2003), believing that musicality is a label that applies onto those with specialized training in institutionally-sanctioned forms of music making. The students who subsequently enter university music education programs (those in whom university music programs are primarily interested and actively recruit) are those who believe themselves to be musically literate—defined narrowly—thus perpetuating institutional whiteness. Gilroy (1993) suggests that such issues are

tied both to the fate of the intellectual as a discrete, authoritative caste and to the future of the universities in which so many of its learned protagonists have acquired secure perches . . . . The meaning of being an intellectual in settings that have denied access to literacy and encouraged other forms of communication in its place is a recurring question . . . (p.43).

If popular and world musics continue to be “other” forms of communication existing only outside of music education, the discipline perpetuates a system privileging the Western canon. University music programs thus deny access to “literacy” for vast numbers of students (those who never learned to speak the “language” of Western art music), while they also deny students who “speak canon” opportunities to learn to communicate effectively within musical forms that may better serve their future students. Even where university music education programs attempt to include meaningful experiences from diverse musical cultures, institutionalized whiteness often skews those experiences to reiterations of colonialism that rely upon what Said (1978) describes as a continual interchange between scholarly and imaginative constructions of ideas about the Other. These scholarly constructions (ethnomusicology as one example) are supported by institutions which make “statements about it [the Orient]), authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching about it, settling it, rulting over it” (p. 3). Graduates of such programs may enter the classroom with broader knowledge about a greater number of musical practices, but their understanding, developed through and framed by colonialist representations, often remains constrained by racialized binaries: Western music and “other” music; “our” music and “their” music; “high art music” and “popular” music, and so on.

Overcoming Color-Muteness in Music Education

What kinds of acknowledgements do we need to make, and what kinds of conversations do we need to have in order to disrupt the systemic racism embedded within music education? What might we do beyond pointing a discursive “fickle finger of whiteness” at the marching band as a performative reiteration of American capitalism, identifying contrived musical arrangements such as “Four Seasons of Haiku” as a form of cultural looting that reiterates colonial power relationships (Allsup 2005), or even theorizing an emerging multicultural human subjectivity (Bradley 2006a) as a potential outcome of anti-racism pedagogy within glocalized (Robertson 1992) communities? Such scholarship contributes to our understandings in important ways, but I want to move these and similar discussions, discussions in which race is an absent presence (Morrison 1992), from their institutionally white spaces to places where direct and meaningful conversations about race and racism take place.

Pollock’s (2004) research sought to understand why teachers and school administrators had difficulty talking about race. Originally framed as an ethnography in the “under-resourced, ‘low-income’ minority” (p. 2) population of a California school, Pollock soon realized that race played as great a role, if not greater, in the school’s difficulties as income or class. Yet, no one seemed willing to speak in racial terms, and indeed, were prohibited from doing so under California’s Proposition 209, which in effect outlawed any mention of racial categories in official documents. As she explains, “colorblindness can often be more accurately described as a purposeful silencing of race words themselves” (p. 3). Our socialization (as whites) causes us to become embarrassed, defensive, angry, or silent when conversation turns to race, and sometimes those responses occur even with the use of codes when they implicate whiteness as ideology (Solomon, Portelli, & Daniel 2005). But as  Pollock’s study indicates, being color-mute actually makes race matter more; it perpetuates racial disparities while it simultaneously and systematically silences the language needed for description, analysis, and criticism. Since Proposition 209 effectively outlawed affirmative action in admissions to public institutions, “the representation of blacks and Hispanics at the two flagship universities declined precipitously” (Karabel 1999, cited in Karen 2007, p. 263). In San Francisco public schools, efforts to increase diversity through the criterion of family income (without reference to race), which officials originally hoped would simultaneously increase racial diversity, have resulted in the opposite: the number of schools where a single ethnic or racial group comprises 60 percent or more of the school population has increased sharply, from 30 to 50 schools, since 2001 (Glater & Finder 2007). Talking as if race does not matter has little effect on solving racial problems (Pollock 2004, p. 2).

How color-mute is music education’s discourse? We talk about musical culture, ethnic music, multicultural music, world music. Music is organized in textbooks by region, continent, nation, or by linear time periods that have meaning only within the context of European history. When we identify music from “Africa,” how big is the eraser we use to collapse 53 countries, hundreds of languages, and vast racial and ethnic diversity into one term? We sing South African freedom songs without ever speaking of the apartheid system that underscores their meaning; we sing spirituals and field yells from the southern U.S. without reference to human slavery; we largely ignore the music of North American indigenous peoples, thereby reiterating apartheid’s “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. We lament that our schools’ large ensemble participants are predominantly white, but do little to try to understand why. As hooks (2003) notes,

It has been easier . . . to accept a critical written discourse about racism that is usually read only by those who have some degree of educational privilege than it is for us to create constructive ways to talk about white supremacy and racism, to find constructive actions that go beyond talk (p. 29).

hooks and Pollock are right: We need to address our fear of talking about race, to find ways to bring race into our conversation as well as our written discourse so that we can move beyond talk to constructive action. In Colormute, Pollock (2004) makes specific suggestions for addressing the fear of talking about race: “In all conversations about race, I think, educators should be prepared to do three things: ask provocative questions, navigate predictable debates, and talk more about talking” (p. 221, italics in original).

While the number of recent articles and conferences suggest that music educators are beginning to ask provocative questions related to issues of social justice, including issues of equity, many academics and teachers still struggle personally at navigating conversational debates. Because white people have been socialized not to talk about race, we should anticipate the potential conflicts that may arise when we attempt to do so (Fishman & McCarthy 2005; hooks 2003; Pollock 2004; Rich & Cargile 2004). If we are not prepared for this to happen, promising conversations may quickly disintegrate into counter-productive arguments (Fishman & McCarthy 2005). Thus, as Pollock suggests, we need to be ready to navigate predictable debates and engage with them compassionately.

It is possible to overcome the reticence to talk about race if we continue to talk more about talking about race (Pollock 2004, p. 225). Talking self-consciously about race talk and its dilemmas permits us to acknowledge that we all face difficulties in talking about race, and that we will all make mistakes from time to time. As hooks (2003) notes, the emphasis on safety in feminist settings may at times work at cross purposes with our ability to talk meaningfully about race. She writes that in the process of unlearning racism,

one of the principles we strive to embody is the value of risk, honoring the fact that we may learn and grow in circumstances where we do not feel safe, that the presence of conflict is not necessarily negative but rather its meaning is determined by how we cope with that conflict (p. 64).

My hope is that we learn to take the kinds of risks that allow for productive conflict, so that we can begin to talk more about talking about race. In doing so, we may all move a little closer to the “color-blind future” that Williams (1997) sees, a day when race truly “doesn’t matter” any longer. This means that we must again look seriously at curriculum, rethinking “whose music” our curriculum valorizes and whose music is ignored, or even denigrated, from the viewpoint of the racial identities in question. As Ellsworth argues, as long as educators do not step outside of their field to point out the contradiction of institutionalized whiteness, it is likely we will remain paralyzed by the failure “to question the racialized paradoxes produced by certain academic practices” (Ellsworth 1997, p. 264). Ellsworth maintains that it is crucial to antiracist scholarship to “metacommunicate about how academic discourses and writing are themselves structured by racial relations” (p. 264).

For music educators, this suggests that we acknowledge and address the ways curricula (at all levels), research practices, audition requirements, and the musical skills that are most valued (to name a few key areas) are also structured by racial relations. We need to learn to talk directly about the raciology at work within music education. Towards this end, I conclude this paper with examples from my own teaching praxis in two separate settings that suggest how bringing race into our pedagogical efforts may encourage transformative learning. I offer these, not as prescriptions or quick fixes that will work in all settings, but as beginning steps towards overcoming color-muteness in music education.

The first example comes from my work with the Mississauga Festival Youth Choir inCanada. I have written elsewhere (Bradley 2006a, 2006b) about the deep sense of recognition that choir members experienced when they sang the South African freedom song, “Haleluya! Pelo Tsa Rona” before an international audience. The South African delegates at the Prison Fellowship International convocation, many of whom had been political prisoners under apartheid, jumped up spontaneously to sing and dance along with us. Interviews with my students long after the event suggest that one of the things the students took away from the “Haleluya! Pelo Tsa Rona” moment was a keener understanding of what the fight against apartheid in South Africa meant for those involved in that struggle. I believe this has much to do with the fact that in our rehearsals leading up to the concert, we talked about apartheid as a form of legalized racism. Our discussions about apartheid developed a context that supported learning the music and ultimately informed the choir’s performance of the song. My students were able, from these discussions, to make their own connections to other examples of racism in society today. We did not shy away from talking about race and racism, nor did we frame racism as something “in the past.” What I discovered in my work with these adolescents is that students are painfully aware of racism in their daily lives. For example, when the choir learned “Make Them Hear You” from the musical Ragtime, their comments revealed that they used the song as a lens for viewing the society in which they live. While interviewing choir members during my doctoral research, I asked each student if any of the choir’s repertoire was especially meaningful for them. Alicia,11 a fourteen-year old black woman, suggested the following:

Alicia: Well, I just think “Make Them Hear You,” because it is something that I can relate to. I guess because there’s still a lot of hate around, like the thing with Iraq and stuff, so even though that’s not exactly about racism, it’s still—it just kind of talks about the same thing (Interview, March 28, 2004).

Amber, a fifteen-year old white student, also volunteered “Make Them Hear You” as a song that helped her see injustice in the world around her:

A: Make Them Hear You is my all-time favorite, hands down. I like musicals and I love that song. And I—every time I hear the lyrics it makes me want to cry.

DB: Okay, can you talk about that a little bit? What is it about that song; what is in the lyrics that makes

A: I think the whole thing, just—like, “how justice was demanded and how justice was denied”—it makes me—I just think of all the people whose lives were affected by things like racism. And not like even just racism, but negativity towards other human beings for something they can’t help. I was talking about this with my mom in the car on the way here, actually. On the bus today there was this, I think, autistic kid on the bus, and after he got off there were these two guys I know rocking back and forth making fun of him, and I told them off. I’ve been in a bad mood for the rest of the day because it really bothered me (Interview, March 29, 2004).

In my work with this group of young people, they repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to talk about racism and related oppressions because we worked to provide a supportive environment for doing so. When we as teachers ignore issues because we fear “uncomfortable conversations,” we unintentionally marginalize both the issues and the students who experience racism and other oppressions in material ways. However, the job of educator carries an obligation to help our students make sense of the world around them, including the positive, the negative, and the perplexing. Music education places us in a unique position to deal head-on with such issues. Music as a human endeavor, emerging as it does from the realities of life, provides a natural opening for conversations from which students make meanings and construct understandings.

While age-appropriate approaches are important, even young children understand difference (recall Williams’ story about her son earlier in this paper). This suggests the importance of learning music from diverse cultures, in a range of styles as well as languages beginning with the youngest learners. It is one way to de-center the Western canon within a long-term project “to bring students thorough-going experiences in the music of the world’s cultures where the West is just ‘one of them’ ” (Campbell 2004, p. xvi). From middle to late elementary grades right through high school, these experiences may be additionally enriched by talking with students about the social and historical contexts for all the music we teach, including their racial implications. African-American spirituals emerged from the condition of race-based slavery; what is now called the blues began after slavery had officially ended but freedom was legally withheld through Jim Crow laws and social norms that reiterated white supremacy. Our current interest in multiculturalism and world musical forms derives from the global migration set into motion through colonial conquests and economies based upon racial slavery (Gilroy 1993). This is a history that our students need to know, and in learning it through and as part of the music, they develop much deeper understandings of music’s sociality, as well as its role in our constructions of identity and our relationships with others. I believe our students may also develop the sort of social consciousness that will serve  them well as future parents, community leaders, teachers, youth workers, government legislators, filmmakers, writers, and musicians, to name just a few areas that shape societies.

My second example comes from work with university music education students, where I believe it is particularly important to help students understand whiteness and white privilege. I begin by having my students read and discuss Peggy McIntosh’s (1990) White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, followed by other selected articles about white privilege in educational settings, so that when these students eventually enter their own classrooms, they are better able to reflect upon their assumptions and attitudes. It is my hope that they will learn to see their students as individuals rather than as members of racial groups. Seeing individuals is not color-blind, however; it implies both seeing and valuing the differences that make each student unique.

I recently received an email from a former graduate student whose comments suggest that my efforts have (at least some) positive effect:

I went to a World Drumming Curriculum workshop in Oconomowoc just last week, and recognized SO MANY of the issues that we discussed in class in the participants of the workshop. I really am more cognizant of racial issues around me and within myself. Thank you for helping me unearth and recognize these conflicts as meaningful, important, and nothing that ought to be swept under the rug in favor of perfect positivity in the classroom (Personal communication, July 6, 2007).

Our penchant for “perfect positivity” in the classroom is, I believe, one of the obstacles we must overcome to address race more meaningfully in music education. As discussed previously, the assumption that conversations about race are automatically negative compromises our ability to discuss social issues with our students (at all levels) from critical perspectives. While talking about race with students may be challenging, it is necessary if we wish to disrupt the normative whiteness that continues to dictate what and how we teach musically, and how we educate future music teachers.

Once we stop evading race talk in music education, we will begin to see changes that have proven very elusive over the years. Engaging meaningfully with our students about oppressions, racial oppression included, may provide a needed catalyst for transforming a discipline that remains sadly out of sync with the students we currently serve and those whom we desire to serve. Talking openly about race and about music education’s racialization is a small but crucial step towards social justice through music education, and towards a more socially just music education.

Notes

1Information from the district is based upon the category “fine arts,” which includes music, visual art, dance, and drama. Information by specific subject area is not presently tracked.

2 Madison Metropolitan School District, Madison, WI, information courtesy of the MMSD Fine Arts Task Force, http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/boe/finearts/20070326/3.Fine_Arts_Demographics.pdf

3 Feminist scholars similarly acknowledge the intersections of oppressions. Within feminism, gender is the primary lens for analysis; within anti-racism, race provides the primary analytic lens.

4 I use the concept of discursive framework as one that differs from a “theoretical” framework, in that anti-racism’s focus is on social phenomena. In this regard, anti-racism does not seek to develop“grand theoretical bedrock” (Dei 2000, p. 33) to explain such phenomena.

5 Also see “Post-Civil Rights Music; Or Why Hip Hop is Dominant” (Walcott 2005) for a discussion of the dominance of black music in North American popular culture.

6 I take this opportunity to reiterate the intersectionality of various oppressions including those named in here with those based upon race; hence, “off topic” is in scare quotes.

7 I want to add here that in my experience, the reluctance to talk about race does seem more prevalent among “polite white folks” who refuse to engage in arguments with overtly racist white people, who often are not at all reluctant to talk about race, usually in damaging and destructive ways. By maintaining silence, polite white people allow racists to have the last word, thus upholding white supremacy.

8 https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ http://www.psych.uni.edu/psychexperiments/Exps/IAT_Race/IATRace.htm

9 See https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/background/faqs.html#faq1 for details.

10 In the case in point, the world percussion ensemble was open only to percussion majors, and thus was also a form of institutional disciplining. The student in question was a vocalist who tried to gain admission.

11 All names used in the study and in this paper are pseudonymns.

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Race Music

Article;

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Matthew A. Killmeier

Prior to the emergence of rhythm & blues as a musical genre in the 1940s, “race music” and “race records” were terms used to categorize practically all types of African-American music. Race records were the first examples of popular music recorded by and marketed to black Americans. Reflecting the segregated status of American society and culture, race records were separate catalogs of African-American music. Prior to the 1940s, African Americans were scarcely represented on radio, and live performances were largely limited to segregated venues. Race music and records, therefore, were also the primary medium for African-American musical expression during the 1920s and 1930s; an estimated 15,000 titles were released on race records–approximately 10,000 blues, 3,250 jazz, and 1,750 gospel songs were produced during those years. Race records are significant historical documents of early-twentieth-century African American music and have been and remain influential to artists, audiences, and scholars alike. Most twentieth-century white, popular music–especially rock ‘n’ roll and country–has roots in race music, in particular jazz, swing, and blues.

The terms “race music” and “race records” had conflicting meanings. In one respect, they were indicative of segregation in the 1920s. Race records were separated from the recordings of white musicians, and records based solely because of the race of the artists. On the other hand, the terms represented an emerging awareness by the recording industry of African-American audiences. The term “race” was not pejorative; in fact “race was symbolic of black pride, militancy, and solidarity in the 1920s, and it was generally favored over colored or Negro by African-American city dwellers,” noted scholar William Barlow in “Cashing In: 1900-1939.” The term “race records” first appeared in the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, within an advertisement in 1922.

Race music and records in the 1920s were characterized by the popularity of two significant genres of music and the dominance of three race record labels. In particular, jazz and blues became part of the American musical idiom in the 1920s, popularized in large part through recordings released on Columbia, Paramount, and OKeh. Jazz, the dominant American indigenous popular music, emerged from the New Orleans area to become national, and eventually international, in popularity and practice. For example, Joe “King” Oliver was a seminal figure in jazz, and his band featured Louis Armstrong. Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band came out of New Orleans and was a mainstay in several Chicago clubs; the group recorded some of the earliest and most influential jazz records for the Gennett label. Likewise, Jelly Roll Morton, an influential pianist from New Orleans, recorded groundbreaking songs for the Gennett label.

The blues emerged from diverse regions of the American South and Southwest and had urban and rural progenitors. In the urban North, the vaudeville blues became popular in the early 1920s, especially following the success of Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording. Female blues artists in particular were quite successful during the early 1920s. Artists such as Alberta Hunter, who recorded for Paramount, and Sean Martin, who recorded for OKeh, had a large following through their recordings. The folk blues, with origins in the rural South, became popular in the latter half of the 1920s. Artists such as Texan Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded 75 songs for Paramount between 1926 and 1930, were popular with audiences and would influence later generations of blues artists. Other folk blues artists of note who recorded during this period were Missippians Charley Patton–a.k.a. “The Masked Marvel”–and Son House; both recorded for Paramount.

During the 1930s, the commercial success and expansion of race music and records were impacted by the Great Depression. While sales of race records had reached $100 million in 1927, they had fallen drastically to $6 million in 1933. In response, the record companies dropped their record prices from an average of 75 cents in the 1920s to 35 cents in the 1930s. Until the mid-1930s, few new songs were released and virtually no new race recordings were made; instead the industry re-released titles and songs that had been previously unreleased. Following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the demand for live music increased. And in the late 1930s, the emergence of the jukebox stimulated sales of records. Three race record labels dominated the production of recordings in the 1930s and reflected the impact of the Depression on the music industry: Columbia, RCA-Victor, whose race label was Bluebird, and Decca. Columbia, which had acquired OKeh in 1926, was profitable until 1938 at which time it was sold to CBS. The RCA-Victor label had emerged from RCA’s purchase of Victor in 1928. Decca, a new entry into the race market, was a subsidiary of London-based Decca. Despite the economic downturn, the 1930s were a creative period for race music.

In the 1930s race music was expanded by the popularity of swing. Swing grew out of big band jazz ensembles in the 1920s. Unlike the jazz bands of the 1920s, however, swing was more often arranged and scored, instead of improvised, and used reed instruments as well as the brass instruments that dominated earlier jazz. Swing in the 1930s was epitomized by the Fletcher Henderson Band which featured Louis Armstrong on trumpet, Coleman Hawkins on tenor saxophone, and arranger Don Redman. Other notable swing bands during this period included Chick Webb’s band, which had vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Lunceford’s Band, Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, Count Basie’s Orchestra, and Cab Calloway’s Orchestra.

During the 1940s race records as a distinctly separate catalog of recordings waned due to several factors. The United States’ entry into World War II curtailed the production and consumption of recorded music. In 1942 the government rationed shellac, a key component in the manufacture of record discs, which limited the number of releases. Likewise in 1942, the American Federation of Music announced a ban on all recording and as a result the studios were closed for two years. Following the war and the lifting of the recording ban, recording resumed with verve, but the industry concentrated on mass-market sales and neglected their race catalogs. Small labels that emphasized African-American music emerged in the Midwest and South and challenged the status of the major labels. Significantly, these labels–such as Chess, King, and Vee Jay–did not use the nomenclature “race records.” Race music during this period was greatly expanded. While blues and jazz titles were still being recorded and released, a diversity of styles, collectively known as “rhythm and blues,” began to coalesce. Although race music was still largely produced for and consumed by black audiences, the segregated status of the music and recordings was declining.

Bibliography for: “Race Music”

Matthew A. Killmeier “Race Music“. St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture. FindArticles.com. 04 Dec, 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419101005/

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.

Racism & Music

Music to me is the reflection of the world around us. There is a multitude of snogs that include racist ideas or that some groups find to me offensive racially. The same could be said about all other forms of media, but music is the biggest because it houses on of the most controversial theme in popular culture; the thug. 

Thug music is a verison of hip-hop music introduced in the early 1990s. The songs in ths genre is controversial because of its use of the n-word, first intorducted by white by people as a adaption to the word negro, and for its glorification social unacceptable behavior (violence, and criminal activities). Rappers and hip-hop ethusiast alike argue that thug music is the soundtrack to the lives of the impoverished African American community and it gives young black kids something to believe. Kids in urban ghettos grow up idolizing rappers like Tupac, 50 Cent, and Snoop learning their rise to fame before the laern of abolitionist movement. The lyrics of the music rebel against the conservative ideals of Ameerican society encouraging the listener to do whatever it takes, (kill, steal, or deal) to acquire wealth. Its use of the n-word is just a hold over from past genrations using it as reference to black people, which later became a term of endearment (that is only “acceptable” if miniorities say it).

As a form of expression white supremacist used music as a type of propaganda to propel their ideals further. Similarly other musicians in vast amount of genres introduced ideals or notions within their music that reflects sentiments of either dominance, prejudice or racism. On the other hand some intorduced songs that argued against the type of material that included offensive content. Taking the follwoing video for example:

The album that this track is on is entitled Edutainment. The Boogie Down Productions sought to enlighten the younger generation of the concepts behind race relationships between whites and blacks in addition to blacks to other minority groups. Its a common belief in the African Community that a minority can be racist against another minority and yet ask any black person, who lost a job or scholarship to another minority and they have nothing but deragotory things to say about that individual. Sadly the truth is that every facet of our society reflects on our ideals and even minorities possess sentiments of racism against both whites and other minority groups (in particular the Muslim population post-9/11).

Talking Race, Marketing Culture: The Racial Habitus In and Out of Apartheid

Jeffrey J. Sallaz, University of Arizona

This article uses the concept of habitus to address the puzzle of past-in-present racial formations. Although formal ideologies of white supremacy may be suddenly overturned, the embodied dispositions of the habitus should prove durable and may even improvise new practices that transpose old racial schemata into new settings. Evidence for these propositions derives from an ethnography of marketing practices inside a leisure firm in post apartheid South Africa. In the organizational backstage, veteran white managers routinely categorize consumers as desired “whities” versus denigrated “darkies.” But a second discourse of marketing, found in the front stage, uses survey data to divide the market into “blue-collar” and “jazz” types. By structuring marketing strategy to attract the former and repel the latter, managers exclude black consumers and euphemize such exclusion vis-à-vis the state and other public audiences. Findings extend not only racial formation theory, but also U.S.-based understandings of discrimination. Keywords: racial formations, South Africa, marketing, habitus, discrimination.

The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic transformation in dominant regimes of racial power. In its scale this movement was global, as postcolonial movements in the global south inspired “minority rights revolutions” in the global north, and vice versa (Skrentny 2002). The substance of new racial ideologies is remarkably uniform as well, with assumptions of “white supremacy” having given way to formal recognition of racial equality (Frederickson 2003). Progress in the political sphere, however, belies continued racial and ethnic segregation of markets for key goods and services within societies the world over (Firebaugh 2003).

This phenomenon, that of de jure equality coupled with de facto inequality, raises the question of whether standard research methods can capture new dynamics of race relations. Public opinion surveys, for instance, have demonstrated that white Americans’ racial attitudes have liberalized dramatically over the past half century (Bobo and Charles 2009). But actual reductions in material inequalities have lagged far behind these opinion shifts. So, during the same period in which white Americans increasingly voiced willingness to accept black families into their neighborhoods, patterns of residential segregation remained essentially unchanged (Roscigno, Karafin, and Tester 2009). How, as Howard Winant (2001) asks, are we to understand a “racism [that] operat[es] in societies and institutions that explicitly condemn prejudice and discrimination” (p. 307)?

To study forms of racism that are institutional and hidden, as opposed to individual and explicit, social scientists have assembled a novel array of research instruments. In audit studies, whites and blacks possessing identical credentials are sent to apply for jobs, with unequal rates of call-back signaling the presence of prejudicial thinking among employers (Pager 2007; Pager, Bonikowski, and Western 2009). Other researchers ask whites to keep anonymous personal journals; these are subsequently scoured to uncover secret racial sentiments (Picca and Feagin 2007). The Implicit Bias Project in turn administers online video games requiring rapid-fire responses that reveal subtle prejudices operating below the level of explicit consciousness (Jolls and Sunstein 2006).

Research for this project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the University of California Institute for International Studies. The article benefited greatly from the feedback provided by audiences at speaker series hosted by the University of Arizona Sociology Department, the University of Connecticut Sociology Department, and the Sociology of Work Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. Several anonymous Social Problems reviewers offered suggestions for revision. Direct correspondence to: Jeff Sallaz, Department of Sociology, University of Arizona, PO Box 210027, Tucson AZ 85721. E-mail: jsallaz@email.arizona.edu.

As innovative as these new approaches may be, at least one established method is particularly well-suited for studying covert racism: participant observation. Utilizing the extended case method of ethnography, this article documents how white managers who came of age in an extreme racial formation—apartheid South Africa—experience and act in a new and officially color-blind world—that of democratic South Africa. My field data reveal that marketing personnel within a large, publicly traded leisure firm continue to speak about local consumer markets through racialized categories, but only when they are in the organizational backstage. On the front stage, the routine labor of marketing entails making not racial distinctions but cultural ones. To analyze the interplay between these two classificatory schemata, I elaborate Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and apply it to the theory of racial formation pioneered by Michael Omi and Howard Winant. In short, I find that managers exhibit an entrenched apartheid habitus that simultaneously perpetuates and dissimulates discriminatory practices under an inclusive racial ideology. They see, feel, and talk race, but market culture.

Theoretical Overview: Racial Paradigms, Practices, Dispositions

Sociological theories have long struggled to navigate the twin shoals of realist versus nominalist approaches to race. The former posits race as a fixed, essential, and typically biological attribute of human beings; the latter as a fiction perpetuated by dominant groups. In a seminal 1994 work, Omi and Winant coined the term racial formation to describe the simultaneously real and constructed nature of race. The argument, in brief, is that different historical epochs give rise to unique schemata for classifying humans based on race—categorical distinctions that are both socially constructed and real in their material and political consequences. In short, “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflict and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (Omni and Winant 1994:55, emphasis in original).

Omi and Winant further delineate three specific elements comprising a given racial formation. First, an overarching ideology consisting of knowledge claims about various races and the proper relations among them; these are often inscribed in formal documents such as political constitutions, legal coda, and other institutional “mission statements.” Second, concrete practices as they are coordinated and accomplished through organizations and their technologies. And third, particular racial identities, that is, those “ways in which we understand ourselves and interact with others” (Omni and Winant 1994:67). Descending from the macro to the micro, then, a racial formation consists of an ideological paradigm, institutionalized practices, and individual dispositions.

A number of empirical studies have explored how these three elements interact at a given historical moment (e.g., Foote 2004; Roediger 1999; Sturm 2002; Wacquant 2009). A related body of scholarship has inquired as to how the constitutive elements of a given racial formation change over time, especially across a radical rupture such as that of the twentieth century transition from overt white supremacy to new formations of “color-blind” (Bonilla- Silva 2003) or “laissez faire” (Bobo 2004) racism. Many of these studies have found that racial identities remain salient, especially as they are expressed through informal talk and gossip among one’s intimates (e.g., Myers and Williamson 2001; Roberts, Bell, and Murphy 2008). But less progress has been made in analyzing how such “race talk” contributes to the perpetuation of systemic inequality. What remains opaque are the mechanisms through which obdurate racial identities generate new organizational practices and institutional forms. This reflects, on one hand, a failure of standard research methods (such as surveys and structured interviews) to capture how people “do” race in everyday life; on the other, the need for a unified theoretical apparatus with which to analyze the relationship between entrenched identities and emergent practices. As a result, sociologists of race continue to wrestle with the fundamental question of how “past-in-present racial formations have effects that endure in the present . . . regardless of changes in ideology” (Collins 2005:84).

I argue that ethnographic research grounded in Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus can help us clarify how paradigms, practices, and identities travel across racial formations. Bourdieu’s theory predicts that these three elements will be differentially malleable and exhibit divergent trajectories—in short, that formal ideologies as articulated in a given political field are more susceptible to sudden change than are the “durable, transposable dispositions” (Bourdieu 1990:53) through which individuals apprehend and act upon the world. To establish a foundation for this theory of action, Bourdieu resurrected the long-dormant habitus concept (Bourdieu 2000:142–3). It depicts social practice as the outcome of a dialectic of incorporation and objectification: individuals internalize structural cleavages during their formative years within a given social formation; while their everyday practical activities will, without any overall coordination or plan, tend to reproduce those formations (Emirbayer and Mische 1998; Swartz 1997; Wacquant 2005).

While a handful of scholars have used habitus to analyze race relations (e.g., Alexander 2002; Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006; Bourgois and Schonberg 2007; Horvat and Antonio 1999), none have systematically explicated its potential for understanding past-in-present racial formations. Three aspects of the concept are germane to the issue. First, and in line with the recent “cognitive turn in the study of [race and] ethnicity,” habitus postulates the existence of “theory-like” cognitive schemata through which individuals classify the people and things of their life worlds (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004:37). These personal schemata, furthermore, “need not match those employed by states;” a gap may exist between official “front stage” racial categories and those used informally in “backstage” regions (Brubaker et al. 2004:35). Second, the fundamental categories of the habitus (i.e., those acquired during socialization and especially those relating to basic social schisms such as race) are not simply cognitive; they are deeply embodied and hence highly durable (Bourdieu 1972:87, 2005:17). Racial “knowledge,” writes Jonathon Jansen (2009), “is in the blood” (p. 170). And third, the schemata of the habitus not only interpret stimuli, they generate conduct (Bourdieu 2001:38). This is to say that actors are able to creatively improvise when they encounter new worlds, but they tend to do so in line with a principle of transposition, whereby new practices will express the foundational logic of preexisting principles (Bourdieu 1984:23). In short, habitus predicts that individuals who came of age in one racial formation will tend to generate practices that simultaneously preserve entrenched racial schemata and obey the letter (if not spirit) of new, nonracial paradigms.

Case and Methods: Studying South Africa across Racial Formations

Contemporary South Africa represents an ideal setting for studying the interplay of paradigms, practices, and dispositions across a radical transformation of racial formations. For most of the twentieth century, the country was governed by an extreme ideology of “white supremacy” Manichean in its manifestations (Frederickson 1981). Following their victory in the Boer War of 1899–1902, British authorities formulated policies codifying the superiority of white colonists over the country’s indigenous population (Marx 1998). The Afrikaner National Party (NP) that came to power in 1945 in turn elaborated this notion of racial inequality into a full-fledged doctrine of “separate development,” or apartheid (Wolpe 1972). The NP’s Population Registration Act of 1953 specified that all individuals, regardless of ethnicity or skin color, must be classified as either black or white (Adhikari 2009); while the Separate Amenities Act (also of 1953) segregated urban space (Bonner, Delius, and Posel 1994). The apartheid project reached its zenith, however, with the Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act of 1970. It created a system of “homelands” (small and typically desolate patches of land) onto which the majority black population was to be “relocated”—that is, sequestered and controlled (Christopher 2001; Hart 2002).

Apartheid ideology gave rise to commensurate practices and dispositions. NP officials, for instance, established a bureaucratic system of pass laws to regulate the movement of blacks between the rural homelands and urban South Africa, where many worked in the mining industry and as domestic servants (Moodie and Ndatshe 1994). Everyday life, meanwhile, was governed by a simple code whereby whites were endowed with an ethnic status honor and blacks expected to exhibit deference in their demeanor (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). In their interactions, whites treated blacks with paternalism or scorn, but rarely as equals (Cell 1982). The apartheid racial formation, in sum, strove to synchronize identities and practices in service of a larger paradigm of white supremacy.

The NP, in response to both a domestic insurgency and international pressure, ended the apartheid project in 1994 by ceding power to the African National Congress (ANC) (Bozzoli 2004; Schwartzman and Taylor 1999). The ANC in turn instituted a constitution widely hailed as exemplary in its endorsement of racial equality. No longer the land of apartheid, South Africa now proudly wears its label as the world’s model “rainbow nation.” It thereby represents a key test case for the theory of racial formations (Bezuidenhout 2005). The late 1990s witnessed a revamping of formal ideology and a banning of discriminatory practices. But insofar as this was a peaceful transfer of power, many whites who participated in and benefited from the apartheid system remain in positions of power, especially throughout the economy (Marais 1998). Have their dispositions adjusted accordingly? What sort of practices does an apartheid-era habitus generate under a post apartheid racial ideology?

To address such questions, I conducted ethnographic research in an economic institution that spans these two racial formations: the casino-entertainment industry. In 1972, the apartheid state passed legislation allowing South African leisure firms to build and operate casino resorts in the homelands. Managers in these firms were exclusively white, and their practices betrayed a habitus marked by the apartheid formation (Crush and Wellings 1983; Stern 1987). To the international community they sought to portray an image of racial harmony and integration. But in fact, they catered to white patrons (who sought hiatus from the puritanical culture of South Africa proper) and barred entry to black residents of the homelands (many of whom did seek to visit the resorts—to gamble, dance, sightsee, drink, and occasionally panhandle). Not only would managers physically eject blacks from the premises, they devised new business practices to segregate the consumer market through less direct means. For example, they began charging steep fees to enter the casino—not to generate revenues (the industry standard is to subsidize no gambling expenses), but to exclude, in the words of one of my interviewees, the local “darkies” (a pejorative label for Africans used especially by British colonists; see Kennedy 2002).

Following the fall of apartheid, the homeland system was dissolved, but not its casino industry. In fact, the ANC opted to expand gambling as a means for collecting from citizens a “painless tax” (Sallaz 2006). Government officials even granted casino licenses to many of the same firms and individuals who had operated the homeland resorts, but only on condition that they no longer discriminate against black consumers.1 Casino firms are today required to serve as multicultural leisure spaces, and many have even funded the construction of educational facilities such as museums commemorating the anti-apartheid struggle (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). In sum, we here find a single cohort of managers that has moved across racial formations, raising the question of how their dispositions (regarding race) and practices (of marketing) have or have not adapted.

1. I should note here one important caveat. In documenting how white casino managers segregate the consumer market, I do not imply that remedial steps should be taken to make gambling more accessible to South Africans, black, white, or otherwise. My personal view is that it is possible to regulate gambling so as to both accommodate existing demand and protect those for whom it may prove too powerful a lure. Nor do I feel that the current law for regulating gambling in South Africa meets this ideal.

Between 2002 and 2006, I spent a total of one year conducting ethnographic research inside “Empowerment Inc.,”2 a South African leisure firm with roots in the apartheid-era casino industry. This article draws upon 15 semi structured interviews conducted with corporate executives and three months spent working as an unpaid intern in the marketing department of the firm’s new “Rainbow City” entertainment complex in Johannesburg. Field data were collected and analyzed in line with the extended case method (ECM). As a technique of ethnography, the ECM dictates that the researcher focus upon social processes as they unfold in real space and time (Burawoy 1998, 2009; Gluckman 1961). (An injunction known also as the Becker Principle: while one’s research subjects may dissemble their “real” thoughts and behaviors during an interview, it is practically impossible to do so over the long stretches of time ethnographic research entails; see Duneier 1999). Thus, the bulk of the data presented herein consists of naturally occurring speech and interactions that I observed, recorded into a small notebook, and later transcribed.

Further details on method are provided at relevant points in the following empirical analysis, itself divided into two sections. The first offers a series of ethnographic tales illustrating how the racialized managerial habitus operates in the organizational backstage. In the second, I describe the official practice of corporate marketing as it takes place in the front stage via a database technology known as “the matrix.” I conclude by discussing the value of the habitus concept for illuminating the durability of racial dispositions, and that of the South African case for illustrating the capacity of such dispositions to survive even under the watchful gaze of a strong state.

Managerial Habitus Backstage

Following Erving Goffman (1959, 1969) and Donileen Loseke (2005), we may conceive of organizations as divided into backstage regions (wherein actors talk and strategize beyond the purview of external audiences) and front stage ones (wherein action is performative in nature). And in line with racial formation theory, we would expect that entrenched racial dispositions would be expressed most freely and fully in the former—in the organizational backstage. This is precisely what I discovered at the Rainbow City entertainment complex. Although they have officially pledged to make it a multicultural space open to all, (white) managers still see and speak about the consumer market in explicitly racialized terms. But they do so only in those administrative spaces they dub the “back of house” and to which my position as an ethnographer/intern gained me access.

Enter the Executive Backstage

The process of negotiating entrée to one’s field site, according to the extended case method, is not mere preparation for subsequent research, but an important moment of data collection in its own right. Because organizational members are often suspicious of outsiders, the act of approaching “gatekeepers” and requesting from them permission to conduct fieldwork can reveal much about underlying dynamics of power within the site: “Any group will . . . put up a great deal of formal and informal resistance to being studied at close quarters—resistance that discloses much about the core values and interests of its members” (Burawoy 1998:17).

2. A pseudonym, as are all proper names in this article. This is to the best of my knowledge the first ever such ethnographic study in South Africa, and one of a few ever done of corporate marketing practices anywhere.

There were certainly reasons to suspect that elites within Empowerment Inc. would be anxious to control the impression they gave outsiders. Following years of criticism over alleged collaboration with the apartheid state, the firm was now attempting to “rebrand” itself as a symbol of racial harmony. In all official documentation, corporate rhetoric was either race neutral or explicitly inclusive. For instance, the original blueprints for Rainbow City portrayed a racially integrated clientele strolling through shopping plazas and food courts, while the cover page of the license proposal featured a woman dressed so as to connote a multicultural, Brazilian-style Carnival. The rhetoric accompanying such drawings described an emergent Gemeinschaft community:

“Societies who toil together, day after day, need to play together. The great festivals and carnivals of the world are prime examples of these eagerly awaited, carefully planned, national gatherings. The rich pageantry . . . prompts people from all walks of life to party and mingle, cares and worries temporarily forgotten, and simply enjoy being with their families, friends and town folk.”

Government regulators made clear that they would both review the firm’s marketing material to ensure that no discriminatory messages were being disseminated, and investigate any allegations of differential treatment of nonwhite patrons. Behind the scenes, however, Empowerment Inc. executives continued to speak about the market and the state in explicitly racial terms. The top stratum of corporate management remains today much as it was during apartheid: white and male. Of the 15 executives I interviewed, all were white (of either British or Afrikaans descent) and 13 were men. All had commenced their careers as workers or floor managers in the homeland resorts, and subsequently ascended the corporate ladder. Although they seemed to me fortunate to have maintained their positions of power following the fall of apartheid, they spoke with suspicion and odium about the new government whenever the topic arose. Consider my initial contact in the firm, Jack Lee, Empowerment Inc.’s Vice President of Business Development. Jack emerged as a key informant, even granting me three complete interviews over the course of my fieldwork. As I walked into his office for our first meeting, he rose from his desk to greet me with a wide smile and pointed me toward an overstuffed leather chair. In my field notes, I recorded my first impression of Jack as “corpulent and friendly, reminding me of a giant teddy bear.” After his secretary, Ursula, brought us two cups of tea, Jack began recounting to me the process through which the company had transitioned to the new political dispensation. As our conversation progressed, however, John’s tone changed in a way that caught me by surprise:

“Look, we had to deal with the baggage of our past, no doubt. We sat down face to face with these new gambling boards and said, “Would we be sitting here with these empowerment consortiums [groups of prominent black businesspersons given an equity stake in the new resorts] and all these banks willing to finance us if we were racist?” . . . What it boiled down to was that here you had the ANC, basically a terrorist group that had been living in the bush for all these years. Then the blacks come to power, but only a third of them can find their way into government. They then look out for the other two-thirds, so their leaders get rich at the expense of all the rest of us.”

Nearly all of my interviewees expressed similar sentiments. While they’d had a “working relationship” with the previous regime, the new state was hostile, incompetent, and corrupt, thereby making life difficult for them. And as John’s narrative attests, this general animus toward the state was experienced and spoken about in racial terms: the “blacks” in power versus “the rest of us.” In fact, the topic of race per se rarely arose in my interviews. But this phenomenon, whereby political and economic distinctions were recoded as racial ones, recurred frequently. For instance, the firm’s human resource director explained to me that employee theft within the company was strictly a “PDI thing” (PDI, an acronym for previously disadvantaged individual, is used in state documentation to denote black South Africans): “They live in squatter camps and now we give them a [cash] register with forty thousand bucks in it. Well what do you expect?” Empowerment Inc.’s marketing director later stated matter-of-factly that the company does not target the “black market.” There can be little doubt that my interviewees were speaking to me from what they perceived to be a backstage space. And that their discourse revealed the continued existence of an “apartheid habitus” that perceives the world in terms of a black-white binary. My general impression was that it is only during the occasional meeting with a representative of the government or media that executives assumed their speech to be public and so self-censored accordingly. But I did not fall into either of these categories. First, I was referred to the firm through an inside connection: a former college instructor of mine who had a long-standing friendship with Jack Lee. My own presentation of self further facilitated candor. In order to make my interviews as ethnographic as possible (i.e., to capture respondents’ naturally occurring discourse), I did not use a tape recorder (instead reconstructing immediately following the interview, as completely as I could, the general narrative and key quotations). I kept the interviews moving at a brisk pace, by structuring conversation around a series of open-ended questions on respondents’ work histories. And to qualm any fears over public disclosure, I made clear that both their personal identities and the identity of the firm would be kept anonymous.

3. Empowerment Inc. submission to Gauteng Gambling Board.

My work experience, race, nationality (and likely gender) further seemed to establish me, in the eyes of executives, as a safe ear. Several mentioned how envious they were of casino operators in America, where the state lets managers run their business as they see fit. And when I finally mustered the courage to ask directly for permission to conduct research inside one of his new properties, Jack Lee was surprisingly enthusiastic. He agreed that I could serve as an unpaid intern, and even suggested in a somewhat joking manner (i.e., with a half-wink and exaggerated smile) that I serve as his “eyes and ears” on the ground by reporting back to him on the “PDIs” working at Rainbow City. I laughed as I explained that as a researcher, I would have to refuse this as an explicit condition. John laughed too, and said I was of course still welcome to do the internship.4 He was happy to do a favor for an old associate in America, and was anyway interested to hear my ideas. I would surely, he stated, sympathize with his plight as an embattled minority in the new South Africa.

Code-Switching at Rainbow City Upon arriving at Rainbow City I was assigned to the marketing division, where I worked full time (40 hours per week) for 11 weeks. The department consisted of about 50 employees distributed over four internal units: customer database maintenance, telemarketing, promotional events, and the VIP Club. My internship involved brief stints inside each unit (where I did routine labor such as data entry and receiving calls at the onsite call center). This allowed me to engage in conversation with the staff and, more generally, experience the routine doing of marketing on the organizational front stage. A good portion of my research, however, took place in the backstage, especially during a month-long period in which I served as the personal assistant (PA) to Belinda, the marketing head. With her I attended all department functions, including otherwise closed-door meetings.

The demographics of property-level managers were identical to those of corporate executives

(all were white and veterans of the industry), although there were important differences

in regard to the audiences with whom they interacted on a regular basis. Empowerment Inc. executives, ensconced in their exclusive office suites, experience the majority of their time as backstage action. The same is not true for Rainbow City managers. They spend a considerable portion of their average day moving back and forth between backstage regions (especially their small offices in the rear of the casino complex) and front stage ones (where they engage in interpersonal dealings with representatives of potentially hostile audiences such as workers, consumers, and the provincial gambling board). Do Rainbow City managers continue to deploy racialized categories of thought and judgment? If so, how does this entrenched habitus manage this “local” organizational infrastructure (especially the frequent movement between back and front stage spaces it requires)?

4. I met with Jack at the end of my fieldwork to share my thoughts as a researcher and former employee in the industry. I described to him the low morale at the casino and inconsistencies in its marketing plan. But importantly, I refused to discuss these issues in racial terms or to provide him any details that could be used to identify individual workers or managers.

Prolonged immersion among marketers revealed that they do engage in explicit “race talk” while backstage (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Myers 2005). The white-black binary that characterized the apartheid social structure continues to structure informal discussion around practically all standard divisions made within the formal discourse of business marketing: different types of clients, the temporal division of the business cycle, and even the spatial organization of the property. Managers routinely drew invidious comparisons between white and black consumers, and discussed concrete action to attract the former and exclude the latter. Such talk, I argue, provides evidence that at least some core features of the managerial habitus remain “raced.”

 The quintessential backstage setting for marketing managers was the department’s weekly planning meeting. It took place in a small conference room on the top floor and was considered “closed-door” in that only authorized personnel were allowed to attend. In addition, it was a forum specifically designed for managers to speak freely, to “brainstorm” ideas, and to shout out thoughts that came “off the top of your head” as they discussed the casino’s overall marketing strategy. On a typical week, there were seven attendees (not counting me). Six were managers, all of whom were white. These included Belinda; Paul, Rainbow City’s general manager; Gareth, the slots department head; Ernie, the head of tables; Yolanda, the promotions coordinator; and Keith, the marketing director for Empowerment Inc., who made a special visit from the head office each week to attend the meeting. With the exception of Belinda, who was recently hired after working for several years at an upscale auto distributor, all managers were industry veterans and had been with the company for at least ten years. The sole black employee in attendance was Paul’s secretary Thandela, who had worked for the firm since the late 1980s.

Discussion during the weekly planning meeting typically flitted across a variety of topics, but most talk orbited around the fundamental unit of analysis for marketers: “events.” These were short-term promotions (lasting anywhere from a day to a month) organized as a particular “theme” and usually culminating in a high-profile happening such as a music concert, sporting contest, or comedy show. Conversation concerning events at Rainbow City validated the findings of Roland Marchand (1986) and Robert Prus (1989) that marketing is as much an art as a science. As managers debated strategy, they sometimes cited “hard” financial data. But most evidence mobilized in a support of a particular point was “soft” in that it consisted of anecdotes about past events and gut-feelings about future ones. Furthermore, it was not considered unacceptable for the stories told at these moments to use racial terms. The ideal customer was routinely labeled a “white,” while blacks were common targets of contemptuous statements and unflattering jokes. For instance, during the first week of my internship I was introduced to a figure of speech that I would end up hearing so often as to come to refer to it in my field notes simply as the “rich darky trope”:

This morning at the planning meeting, Belinda tells the table that she has been approached by a local music promoter to put together a jazz show in the main arena. The room suddenly goes quiet. Keith puts down his pen and begins to rub his temples. After a few seconds, Gareth rolls his eyes and says, “Do we need another night of darkies in the place?” This breaks the silence as the rest of the room snickers.

The next day, I was standing with Paul and Gareth in the doorway of Paul’s office. Their conversation turned to the subject of boxing matches. These were especially problematic events to plan for, Gareth was saying, because they attract “both whities and darkies,” and you had to be careful not to let the latter linger about. This time, Thandela, who was sitting at her desk just a few feet away, interjected: “But you mustn’t forget about us high class darkies!” “But even you high class ones hardly spend,” Paul responded, “You see them come in and then six of them will sit at a table in the bar with half a can of coke between them.” Gareth laughed heartily, while Thandela dismissively waved her hand at the pair and turned back to her computer screen.

As this example conveys, managers regularly conflated “darkies” with low spenders. But it would be a mistake to conclude that race served merely as a shorthand notation for class. Race talk saturated backstage areas, typically bringing with it emotionally laden expressions of scorn, ridicule, and disgust. Consider the meeting at which the possibility was raised of hosting an “African holiday” event. “That’ll be stunning,” Yolanda responded, in a tone of voice meant to be ironic, “In they’ll come, straight out of the bush.” Even in situations where it seemed that race would be superfluous, it was still used as a descriptor. Thus, events which might attract black visitors were termed “racial promotions,” while the property’s ideal market was spoken of as the “white working class” or the “Afrikaner punter from the suburbs.” The white/black binary, in sum, was so deeply entrenched as a category of perception that managers could not see, imagine, or discuss the consumer market without it.

The same held for the temporal flow of the business cycle. Managers spoke of the weekends, and especially Friday and Saturday evenings, as their “money-making” times during which they would cater to “whities.” But they were also cognizant that the firm had pledged, in its initial business plan, to operate Rainbow City as a community-oriented business that would open its doors to black consumers. As a nod to this larger legitimacy imperative, they bracketed several weekdays each month as their “community service” times. These were considered nonbusiness nights on which the casino would portray itself as the community gathering place depicted in its proposal. To quote the Rainbow City general manager:

Our business moves in cycles, weekends being hectic. Especially after a Friday payday. It slows down in the middle of the week and in the middle of the month. These we think of as troughs, and here we do what we have to do: open up the sluice gates of [a nearby black township] to fill the place up. Play some kwaito [a fast-paced form of music popular among black South Africans], give away a bakkie [a van commonly driven in the black townships] or something like that, contract some busses to bring them in. These are our community service nights.

The black/white distinction was also used to discuss divisions within the organization itself. For instance, those departments headed by black managers (human resources, employee training, community relations, etc.) were jokingly referred to as “empowerment” zones. The derogatory “empowerment” label was even applied to different categories of staff within the marketing department. The most vivid example of this to occur during my fieldwork involved a debate over a new promotional idea. Corporate executives had just proposed a new mascot to serve as the face of the Rainbow City brand: the “Millionaire Surprise Man.” He was to wear a glittery suit made out of money, carry a briefcase stuffed full of (fake) banknotes, and be accompanied at all times by two scantily clad female “assistants.” His main duty would be to hand out coupons and vouchers during surprise appearances on the casino floor as well as at nearby shopping malls and street intersections.

During the planning meeting dedicated to this new promotion, a dispute broke out between Paul and Belinda concerning the race of the Millionaire Man and his female assistants. Corporate had given the casino permission to hire three men and seven or eight women to play the characters (so as to provide around-the-clock coverage and in the event that simultaneous appearances were called for). As department head, Belinda viewed the staffing of the Millionaire Man crew as a marketing issue, and even stated that they “should all be white” so as to cater to the Afrikaner market. But Paul saw the promotion as a chance to diversify the company’s public image. The community relations department had been pressing him to hire a black employee to represent the casino in the local community, and so “at least one of them [the Millionaire Men] should be black.” He continued, “That way, we can kill two birds with one stone.” After approximately 15 minutes of debate, a compromise was reached. All of the Millionaire Men would be white, but half of all his female “assistants” would be black. That way, Paul summarized, “we’ll always have a black face out there, and everyone’s happy.” But this outcome did not please everyone. After the meeting I heard Ernie on the phone complaining about the compromise: “We wanted only hotties [as Millionaire Man’s assistants], some real nice tits and ass, but it got turned into a PDI thing. [Pause]. Yeah that’s right, we gotta have both blacks and whites.”

Reflections of a Divided Habitus

Among managers at Rainbow City, race was not epiphenomenal. It did not simply signify class or income. On the contrary, the white/black binary was so deeply entrenched— embodied, even—that it served as the default way to discuss and evaluate a range of marketing practices. Furthermore, this apartheid era habitus was free to express itself in full force during the weekly planning meetings. These impromptu brainstorming sessions were like organizational time capsules, in which a small core of veteran managers came together to talk and strategize as they had during the early days of their careers spent in the hyper segregated homelands.

But of course the world around them had changed dramatically. The ideology of white supremacy was officially proscribed, with principles of color blindness and black empowerment now the norm. This generated a second sort of backstage talk, still “raced” but more reflective in tone. In informal settings such as the hotel bar or in someone’s office over cigarettes and coffee, members of the managerial clique would reflect upon and debate the future of the casino industry in South Africa. Such talk revealed evidence of what can be labeled a divided or cleft habitus. Bourdieu (2008) used the term to describe the state of mind of an individual who experiences a profound disjuncture between his or her current situation and the world in which he or she was raised. Depending on the specific circumstances, it can result in despair, confusion, or even mobilization (Bourdieu 1979, 1988). At Rainbow City, however, managers’ cleft habitus produced feelings of cynicism and even fatalism. This was a worldview that made strong distinctions between the radiant past in which they had commenced their careers (and that lives on today in a compressed form in the organizational backstage) and a bleak future that they acknowledge as inevitable but also wish to forestall for as long as possible.

Consider that managers regularly debated among themselves whether it was indeed rational to cater their product to what they labeled a “dying breed” of middle-aged “whities,” given the transfer of power and wealth underway in the country. It was widely accepted that the Rainbow City project had been overcapitalized. Four years after its opening, visitation numbers were only 70 percent of initial projections; concretely, this meant that most days and evenings the bulk of the casino’s 2,000-plus slot machines sat empty. “We’re less a rainbow city than a ghost town,” went a running joke among staff. On several occasions I was privy to conversations in which the issue was raised that, given the high sunk costs in the facility and the negligible incremental increases in operating costs per visitor, it made little sense to not take steps to fill the place up as much as possible, even if this meant targeting the “black market.” (I had initially expected managers to claim that whites would refuse to “punt” in a space shared with blacks, but, when I raised this point, they admitted that “white flight” was unlikely given the firm’s monopoly on gambling in this region of the city.)

While it was technically true that blacks on average spent less per visit than did whites, managers acknowledged that incipient black interest in casino games did exist and could be cultivated. After one marketing meeting, I asked Gareth (the slots manager) why he thought blacks didn’t gamble, to which he responded: “Many come in and don’t know how the games work, so they stand there watching people play. I’ve seen a white guy playing the slots with three black guys standing behind him watching.” He continued, “We’ve talked about creating games more in line with what they [i.e., blacks] play. Especially given that in 10 or 20 years this place will look very different, we know that. But at the last meeting we decided to leave it for the long term, to not worry about the black market right now. Not bloody likely that we’ll be around by then anyhow.”

As Gareth’s statement illustrates, veteran white managers’ reflective mode of backstage talk exhibited fatalism. Following the fall of apartheid, they retained their positions of power within the leisure firm; and today they feel temporarily secure, ensconced as they are in their “back of house” offices. But they also recognize their situation to be ephemeral. An effective system for ensuring skill transfer to blacks will eventually be put into place, and they will have to cede authority. Nor will they be able to reproduce their own positions via transmission to apprentices of their own race. They refer to themselves, and white South Africans in general, as an “endangered species,” the “last of the Mohicans,” and victims of “reverse discrimination.” In sum, whether oriented towards the present or the future, managers’ backstage discourse at Rainbow City remained rooted in the past, insofar as it deployed racialized categories of thought and action.

Front stage Schemata of Marketing

Having expounded the categories and contours of managers’ backstage idiom—especially its denigration of “darkies” as potential patrons—I now explore the discourse of marketing on the organizational front stage. Typical forms of communication here included company documents, public advertisements, and speeches at staff meetings—in short, any media understood by managers to be observable by potentially hostile constituencies. (The strongest audience of all was of course the state, which had granted the firm a “privilege license” only on condition that it ensures equal access to all races). There were two salient characteristics of this front stage discourse. First, it was thoroughly de-raced, thereby providing evidence that managers were able to “code-switch” in act (Anderson 1999). Second, it was not fully decoupled from the backstage discourse. On the contrary, it was embedded within a series of instruments and technologies of marketing that functioned to “synch” entrenched (i.e., racist) identities with emergent (i.e., egalitarian) ideologies.

Communicating with Workers

Beneath the marketing department’s managerial clique worked about 50 employees. The majority (80 percent) was black South Africans, and they performed routine tasks such as data entry or scripted call center work. A key duty of department managers was to keep these workers up-to-date on general marketing strategy and upcoming events. The main forum for such communication was a monthly staff meeting (attendance was mandatory for all marketing employees). These took place in a large conference room and followed a standard format. Managers would sit at a long table on one side of the room and general staff on the other, although white employees often sat either at the managerial table or by themselves at the end of the room. Meetings typically lasted about an hour. For the first 45 minutes, managers would give brief presentations, with time then allotted for questions and comments from staff.

Managerial talk during these meetings was thoroughly “de-raced,” with distinctions between black and white clients either avoided or euphemized. Terms such as “darkie” were never uttered; instead, managers explained that “we” must keep out the “riff-raff” who come in but don’t spend any money. And instead of “whites” or “whities,” managers spoke of the casino’s target market as a “blue-collar crowd.” There were in fact few blue-collar jobs in the area, as most mining sites and factories had shut down. Rather than occupation, the term referred to consumers’ cultural tastes (such as rock music and “muscle cars”) and general mindset (depressed about the future). For instance, at one of the staff meetings I attended, Yolanda gave the following summary of how the current economic slowdown was affecting marketing strategy:

The blue-collar market in the [area] is feeling economically depressed right now. Jobs are down while petrol [i.e., the price of gas] is up. Like alcohol, gambling is something to which these people turn when they are depressed, as a way to forget their troubles.

By differentiating between undesired riff-raff and the targeted blue-collar market, managers recast their backstage denigration of “darkies” as the positive provision of an essential (even therapeutic) service to established patrons.

How did black employees of Rainbow City respond to managers’ framing of the consumer market? Thandela, Paul’s secretary and the only worker with regular access to the organizational backstage, did not publicly voice any objections (at least during my fieldwork). She typically would laugh off or even play along with managers’ explicit race talk for a moment or two. It undoubtedly violated new standards of antiharassment legislation as articulated in the Constitution and federal labor protection acts. But as a veteran employee of the company with full-time status, Thandela seemed willing to treat such talk as an ongoing tease-game played at work (Roy 1960).

General marketing staff, however, consisted mainly of young new hires without permanent contracts. When in their presence, managers self-censored their speech and avoided conflict. For example, at one staff meeting a young woman raised her hand after listening to Belinda’s presentation about the local television and radio stations on which Rainbow City was placing advertisements. She spoke, “We are marketing on these radio stations, but the blacks in the townships don’t listen to Jacaranda (an alternative rock music station).” A good portion of the audience whooped, laughed, and clapped in support. Belinda stood silently for a good five or ten seconds, waiting for the clamor to die down, before explaining that, “We have certain groups who are our target market, and we spend our advertising dollars accordingly. It’s really as simple as that.” She then passed the microphone to Keith, who began a PowerPoint presentation on trends in the hotel’s occupancy rate over the past quarter. Within moments the audience members were quiet again, leaning back in their chairs and checking their watches.

Two points can be made about this anecdote. First, managers routinely deployed a simple defensive maneuver whenever the subject of race was raised by staff. They allowed the worker to vent his or her concerns, then changed the subject without rebutting or even addressing the comment. As an assistant manager explained to me: “The blacks go on and on, talking crap. Nothing related to the facts . . . I’ve learned just to sit back and let them talk. If I interrupt I am accused of being biased. So I let them go on and on.” In short, managers had nothing to gain by engaging in conversations about race in the front stage, but stood to lose significantly should the state or some other outside entity be contacted concerning a case of “bias.”

The second relevant point about the anecdote is that it was exceptional. It was one of only a few times during my fieldwork that I heard a staff member take exception to the casino’s marketing plan. On the contrary, among staff, Rainbow City was more likely to serve as an object of mockery or the butt of a joke. Even though it offered a wide array of shopping and entertainment options (such as fast food outlets, retail shops, movie theatres, video arcades, a pool hall, bars, dance clubs, music venues, and even an amusement park—all putting it on par with local shopping malls that are immensely popular places to “hang” for South Africans of all races), Rainbow City was regularly denounced by black employees. It was “corny,” “Afrikaans,” not the sort of place they (or any normal black person) would choose to spend their time or money. A human resource manager summarized the general sentiment:

The entertainment here is daff [corny]. You have to understand, the average [black] man wants to go out on the weekend and have a good time . . . If there is jazz or boxing, now people will come and see the entertainment and then have a drink. But that is all.

How did the exciting new Rainbow City entertainment complex come to be mocked as a “daff” space? To answer this question we must consider the concrete practices through which management packages and markets the facility itself.

Communicating with Consumers

All official communication between Rainbow City marketers and (actual or potential) consumers was mediated through a database technology known formally as the Casino Monitoring System (CMS) and informally as the “matrix.” On the surface, it looks similar to consumer tracking methods used by service firms in the United States and elsewhere. However, CMS was not imported from outside the country. It was independently developed by Empowerment Inc. during apartheid as a technology for preventing employee theft in the homeland casinos. In the early 1980s, following the discovery of a cheating conspiracy among dealers at one of the firm’s flagship properties, management installed data-entry terminals in each of the gambling “pits.” Floor level managers used the terminals to record any large bets placed on the tables, so as to track statistically whether certain dealers were likely to lose such hands (i.e., to be cheating).

Eventually, however, fear of widespread cheating subsided, and the question arose of what to do with this accumulated database of gambling patterns. It was decided to reconfigure the CMS system into a marketing tool. By “tracking” the play of individual gamblers, managers in the homelands could solve a long-standing problem of how to communicate with clients in South Africa (where national law prohibited gambling advertisements). New policies were implemented requiring pit bosses to ask gamblers for their names and addresses, so that marketers could send mailers, coupons, and announcements directly to them. By the end of the 1980s, Empowerment Inc.’s CMS database contained several thousand clients.

Following the fall of apartheid, Empowerment Inc. received notice that its application to build a casino in Johannesburg had been approved. Corporate management opted to not only retain the CMS system at the new Rainbow City, but to expand the amount of information collected on clients. All first-time visitors must now fill out a form collecting basic personal details (age, address, gender, though not race) as well as a survey on interests, hobbies, and tastes. The visitor then receives a personalized “VIP Card” that he or she inserts into a slot machine or gives to the croupier before commencing gambling. Information collected via the cards is stored in the vast customer data “matrix.”

Between Dispositions and Ideology: New Practices of Marketing

In practice, the matrix synchronizes a backstage racial habitus with the formally egalitarian discourse now required on the organizational front stage. It does so by providing marketers: (1) metaphors with which to conceptualize the market; (2) a race-neutral terminology with which to categorize consumers; and (3) tools with which to control visitation patterns. I consider each of these processes in turn.

5. Nor was this sentiment peculiar to black staff. The immediate area around Rainbow City was approximately 80 percent black (African) and 20 percent white (mainly working class Afrikaaners). Yet, my own survey of visitors who walked in through the front door of the complex (regardless of whether they subsequently gambled or not) found that the demographics of visitors were the obverse of those in the community. Eighty percent were white or “other” (mainly Asian); less than 20 percent black. Nor could these visitation patterns be entirely explained by economic factors. Black residents of the area report annual earnings which are one-sixth those of white residents, and spend significantly less per annum on recreation and entertainment than do whites. Yet, many of the gambling games in the casino were inexpensive to play. “Progressive” slot machines offered the chance to win thousands (and occasionally even millions) of rand for just a 25 or 50-cent wager. The price of wagering on such a jackpot actually compared favorably to that of the national lottery, which charged R2.50 per chance at a jackpot. Indeed, black South Africans purchase 60 percent of all lotto tickets. There seemed to be something about the casino itself that discouraged black consumers from spending their gambling “budgets” there.

First, the consumer data matrix provides managers a series of metaphors for speaking about the market and for strategizing in relation to it. Most importantly, the matrix reifies the market as an independent, preexisting “thing” out there. It does so to the extent that marketers, in practice, treat the matrix as coterminous with the market itself. This statement deserves elaboration. Gambling, the company’s marketing plan stated, is a highly standardized product, and so patrons will frequent the casino closest to where they live. And since casinos were spaced out evenly across the province, Rainbow City’s “potential market” consisted of all those who lived within a 20 to 30 minute drive of the property. However, those who resided in this space—labeled the casino’s “catchment area”—were further divided into two groups: those who had at some point in their lives gambled at an Empowerment Inc. casino, and thus “existed” in the matrix, and those who lived within the catchment area but who had never acquired a VIP Card. One strategy of marketing would have been to go after this latter group, to bring them into the matrix. But this approach was eschewed, as official marketing strategy spoke of the province as a pie and of current clients as “our slice of that pie.” Neither the pie as a whole nor our slice of it was going to get any bigger, it was assumed, and so marketing resources should focus on increasing the frequency and duration of current gamblers’ visits. “We’re not trying to bring new feet into the door,” as Belinda stated at a staff meeting. This general strategy was often referred to as “milking the matrix.”

A patron’s race was not at any point coded into the matrix. Nevertheless, because the CMS system originated in the segregated homelands, it was initially populated with white South Africans. This starter database was referred to by company personnel as the casino’s “bread and butter.” Imagining the matrix as a stable bread and butter to be milked provided managers a heuristic with which to mobilize and direct the activities of various strata of employees within the firm (especially the marketing staff). In short, the front stage term “milking the matrix” was a functionally equivalent though de-raced translation of the backstage strategy for targeting “whities.”

In addition to metaphors for conceptualizing the market, the matrix provided models and metrics through which to categorize it. In the organizational backstage, Rainbow City managers classified clients in terms of a binary ordinal ranking. On one hand were local blacks, undesirable as patrons insofar as they didn’t wager large sums and created a bad atmosphere; on the other, desired whites, especially those present in the initial matrix database. Such labels were obviously inappropriate for front stage areas. But the matrix provided a variety of alternate schemata for classifying clients, two of which were used frequently and typically in tandem. One was the interest code, a nominal classification. The VIP Card application listed 57 different interests from which applicants could select as many as they wish, though the most frequently checked interests related to music, food, and sports. The second main classificatory code was known as estimated play, or EP. It is a single numerical value assigned to each matrixed individual representing the average amount of money he or she loses per visit to the casino.

The formal model deployed by marketers to categorize the market consisted of a formula linking interest code and EP. The first step was that of “combing through” the data to discern particular interest codes that tended to clump together. This produced two distinct taste profiles. On one hand were “blue collar” patrons who had chosen interest codes such as country music, rock music, rugby, and auto racing. The casino manager described the typical blue collar gambler to me as: “the type who drives their blue Cadillac with fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror to watch the rugby on Sunday.” On the other hand were “jazz types.” These were card holders who had checked interest codes such as jazz, kwaito, rhythm/blues, or soccer. Once the 57 interest codes were translated into two taste profiles, it was a simple matter to correlate each with average EP. Blue-collar players now had a “worth” several times that of the jazz types, justifying treating the former rather than the latter as a target market. The significance of the interest code typology was that it matched up perfectly with managers’ back-stage way of categorizing and discussing the market.6

Beyond conceptualizing and categorizing the market, the matrix offered a way to control it. This was true to the extent that managers perceived the matrix as providing an efficacious means to attract “blue-collar” and repel “jazz-type” clients. For instance, it guided managerial decisions in the realm of theming, that is, the external and interior décor of the property. The initial blueprints had depicted Rainbow City as a multiethnic community street fair. Over time, however, the design was gradually reconfigured so as to appeal to the white/Afrikaner clients who composed the bulk of the initial matrix database. (Today, the property resembles less a Brazilian Carnival than a gaudy county fair.) As important as the overall theme were motifs chosen for short-term and seasonal promotions held in the various venues throughout the complex. Weekends, especially those following paydays, were busy times during which the tables would be full and the slot machines congested. On these nights managers were especially concerned with excluding the “riff-raff” who might loiter or otherwise take up space. They could not explicitly bar anyone, and so deployed cultural themes derived from the interest codes to create “voluntary” barriers to entry. Friday nights thus invariably featured Afrikaans and Irish folk bands stationed on a podium just inside the main entranceway, a Tom Jones impersonator in the main lounge, and the televisions in the sports bars tuned to rugby and auto racing, not soccer. In contrast, on those weekdays referred to as “community service days,” managers hosted kwaito concerts or soccer nights to appeal to the “jazz crowd.”

Marketers also sought to control the consumer market through public advertisements such as television, radio, and newspaper spots, as well as various forms of “signage” (e.g., billboards). Expenditures were here highly “targeted,” that is, directed to those media believed to reach preexisting matrix gamblers. This entailed placing advertisements in neighborhood-level (as opposed to city-wide) newspapers and scheduling them during sporting events matching the interests of blue-collar gamblers. While such spending patterns were potentially problematic from the point of view of regulators seeking to ensure nondiscriminatory behavior, the official discourse of matrix marketing functioned to fend off accusations that managers were acting improperly. Only once did I witness a representative of the gambling board question a Rainbow City manager regarding the casino’s marketing budget. He asked why we spent the bulk of our advertising dollars on alternative and classic rock radio stations. The marketer responded, “blue-collar types, those are the ones that spend,” which effectively ended the conversation.

Expenditures on public advertising, besides being highly targeted, were relatively small, constituting less than 20 percent of the overall advertising budget. The main method of marketing in fact involved using the voluminous personal information in the matrix to speak directly to existing customers. Birthday cards were sent to cardholders, as were individualized invitations to events and concerts that matched their interest codes. Rainbow City also sent a monthly magazine to consumers. These consisted of full-page color ads, coupons, and announcements of seasonal promotions. I collected and analyzed all of the ads published in this magazine during my three-month marketing stint. In contrast to the images that saturate the firm’s annual reports and that depict an integrated clientele, less than 5 percent of magazine ads (N = 73) depicted a nonwhite consumer. The cardholder magazine, which exists for the most part beyond the purview of the general public, represents an individualized means of communication with the firm’s ideal blue-collar client. It should be pointed out as well that a considerable portion of the work done by marketing personnel consisted of dealing with “unmailables.” These were cardholders whose magazines were returned due to an incorrect address (perhaps it had been entered incorrectly or the patron had moved). When I asked Belinda why these were such a problem, she answered, “well quite simply, we can’t talk to these people.” Direct communication with existing matrix clients, in other words, constituted the main mode of marketing at Rainbow City. As an organizational practice, it functioned to reproduce apartheid-era patterns of consumer segregation in a post -apartheid social order.

6. Though they may not do so for Americans, these codes serve easily as racial proxies in South Africa (where cultural omnivorism is rare).

Discussion: Extending the Theory of Past-in-Present Racial Formations

Omi and Winant (1994) proposed the concept of racial formation to analyze how societal ideologies, organizational practices, and personal identities interconnect to constitute the prevailing racial zeitgeist of an era. Throughout most of twentieth-century South Africa, for example, a formal paradigm of apartheid (racial separation) was articulated through both concrete apparatuses of control (such as laws segregating public space) and an embodied ethos of racial honor (white supremacy). In the years since the publication of Racial Formation in the United States (1994), however, sociologists of race have moved away from static analyses of single racial orders and toward diachronic analyses of how such orders evolve and succeed one another.

In particular, the recent global convergence around a liberal paradigm of racial equality

has stimulated scholars to address the puzzle of “past-in-present” racial formations (Collins

2005). Exactly how malleable, this literature asks, are the three components outlined above?

As official ideologies are rewritten, do practices and identities adjust in turn? In relation to these trends, many scholars, politicians, and citizens adopt a position of “racial optimism” (Kennedy 2003). This line of thinking assumes that “most whites are now truly colorblind,” while “[a]NY remaining inequality is the result of blacks’ cultural pathologies and moral deficiencies, not racism” (Sugrue 2008:32). But sociologists have produced a great deal of empirical evidence showing that race remains a salient principle of division even as societies increasingly embrace “color-blind,” inclusive policies. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) demonstrated how white students actively engage in account making to explain their own racial privilege; Joe Feagin (2001:139) documented the numerous “acts of mistreatment” that saturate the everyday life worlds of African Americans; while Kristin Myers (2005:2) used undergraduate diaries to expose the vocabulary through which whites “denigrate different races and ethnicities” in their everyday “race talk.” Taken together, such studies postulate the existence of a widespread and “covert racism” that simultaneously perpetuates racial inequalities and dissembles itself from public view.

This study provides additional evidence for this proposition, but it also extends racial formation theory in terms of both method and object. On one hand, the majority of covert racism studies rely upon survey, narrative, or interview data (though see Simi and Futrell 2009). While useful, these methods focus upon the discursive level of social life and so may miss the many ways in which entrenched dispositions operate in practice.

To remedy this, I put to use a method—participant observation—grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus. On the other hand, the sociology of race literature typically draws its conclusions from convenience samples of populations in the United States (especially undergraduate students). In contrast, this study broadened the scope of racial formation theory by studying elites (corporate managers) in a non-U.S. context (South Africa). Method and theory were here ideally suited to expose the interplay of entrenched racial dispositions and emergent racial practices in the context of an abrupt transformation in racial ideology. The remainder of this concluding section elaborates upon these twin extensions.

The habitus concept, I have argued, offers a framework for studying how an explicitly racist social formation may survive, if even in transfigured form, within an egalitarian one. It predicts that individual matrices of perception and action will be both durable and improvisational; the data presented herein offered support for both predictions. Apartheid ideology strictly segregated the physical and social worlds into spaces black and white. The incorporated apartheid habitus in turn provided white South Africans a sense of ethnic honor and a concomitant revulsion towards the racial other. Fieldwork among veteran white managers revealed both that they had internalized such a habitus during their early careers, and that at least some core features of this disposition have persisted through the present day. Evidence for these propositions derived from managers’ explicit race talk in their offices and planning meetings. Here they imagined ideal customers as “whities,” and denigrated blacks as curious though unwanted “darkies.” It is appropriate to understand the spaces in which such race talk occurred as an organizational backstage. Here managers who share common occupational origins (i.e., the experience of running leisure resorts during apartheid) could collectively indulge their ingrained habitus by engaging in a racial discourse now officially proscribed.

Ethnographic data also provided evidence that the managerial habitus is capable of improvisation. I found that it generates new technologies for managing consumer markets that both instrumentally exclude certain categories of individuals (especially via cultural themings) and euphemize this exclusion vis-à-vis relevant public audience (especially the state). The key technology was the “matrix,” a player-tracking technology that had originated a decade earlier and for an unrelated purpose (that of preventing employee theft). In practice, it functions as a front stage schemata of marketing parallel to but distinct from the one found in the organizational backstage. Its significance lies in its capacities of synchronization, insofar as it produces its own binary classification of clients that maps perfectly upon the racialized categories used in the backstage; legitimation, insofar as it presents to potential public audiences a technical, race-neutral terminology; and manipulation, insofar as it “themes” Rainbow City as a “daff” venue (attractive to whites and repellant to black South Africans).

It would be incorrect to argue that the backstage schemata of marketing intentionally created the front stage one, or vice versa. The data matrix was not created as an instrumental means by which to dissemble managers’ discriminatory preferences; nor does managers’ backstage talk merely represent an accommodation to the outcomes of the matrix. Rather, these two classificatory schemes emerged in tandem, during the apartheid era, and today function as mutually reinforcing ways of seeing, communicating with, and acting upon the market. The habitus, in sum, innovates practices that mediate between past racialized dispositions and current de-racialized ideologies.

Finally, the case of contemporary South Africa allows us to extend U.S.-centered theory by shifting from the why to the how of segregation, from discerning individual motives to exposing social mechanisms. Antidiscrimination law in the United States, as exemplified by the 1965 Civil Rights Act and with but brief exceptions (Pedriana and Stryker 1997), embodies a “disparate treatment” perspective (Freeman 1995). The state does not proactively monitor markets for evidence of “disparate impact” (Feagin 1991; Ownby 1999). Instead, it requires victims to prove in court that managers denied them some good or service due to discriminatory intent—i.e., that specific individuals were motivated by racial animus. Sociological research has tended to follow this lead, by focusing on the reasoning behind discriminatory behavior and “seek[ing] out victims and culprits” per a “logic of the trial” (Wacquant 1997:222, 225). But methodological individualism coupled with an assumption of regulatory liberalism is inadequate in contemporary South Africa. Its long history of explicit, total segregation obviates attempts to distinguish racial versus rational motivations, while the postcolonial state regulates proactively in line with an overarching logic of racial equality (Gibson 2006; Henrard 2002; Macdonald 2006; Seidman 1999).

The motivational bias of U.S.-centered theory is seen clearly in how it analyzes the issue of consumer discrimination. The phenomenon, whereby service providers seek to exclude an entire category of clients based upon one visible (and socially constructed) characteristic, is seemingly irrational (Lu and Kleiner 2001; Yinger 1998). Economic theory has in fact long contended that discriminating firms will eventually be driven out of business (Arrow 1973; Becker 1971). But sociologists have made two general counter-arguments to this economic position (Lee 2006). The status-group tradition (Blumer 1958; Bobo and Hutchings 1996) argues that individuals endowed with a sense of racial honor will exclude symbolically denigrated groups regardless of the economic costs. Theories of “statistical discrimination” argue that if there exists a correlation between a desired behavior (e.g., propensity to spend) and some visible characteristic (skin color), managers may conserve costs associated with collecting information by using the latter as a proxy for the first (Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). Motivations, though not discriminatory, may still produce pernicious outcomes for minorities (Staiger 2004).

Because status group and statistical discrimination theories make different arguments concerning the rationality of discrimination, they are often presented as competing explanations. But each in fact fits quite well the case of Rainbow City. On one hand, managers’ status identity is salient for how they view the market. Their socialization into a racial caste society and current insecurities regarding their own futures manifest themselves in a deep animus towards black South Africans. On the other hand, blacks do, on average, possess less wealth than whites (Seekings and Nattrass 2006), such that catering to whites undoubtedly conserves information costs. In short, it is impossible to parse out precisely why Rainbow City managers exhibit a “taste for discrimination.” (They themselves debated whether it was rational to exclude black patrons given the oversupply of gambling machines, blacks’ expressed interest in learning casino games, and projected growth of the black market). Nor do status-group and statistical discrimination theories consider how discriminators maintain appearances in the presence of hostile audiences both inside and outside the firm. It was only by examining the interplay of entrenched racial dispositions and new, post-racial paradigms that we could expose the strategies through which marketers maneuvered around the watchful eye of the South African state. We moved, in short, from individual motives to the social mechanisms through which a segregated market is made.

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The Racist Media

By Kevin McCullough
© 2010 WorldNetDaily.com

I asked a caller on my radio show: “So if Christopher Dodd makes openly supportive remarks of a former KKK member, you believe its OK to give him a pass because he is a Democrat?”

Dave, an African-American caller from Brooklyn responded: “Of course …”

This stunning exchange happened six days following a most deplorable event on the floor of the U.S. Senate. On taxpayer-funded time, Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd said, in a tribute to Robert Byrd, that he would be a “great leader” for any portion of American history. In fact, Dodd went on to elaborate that Byrd would have been a great leader at the founding of this country.

He said he would have been a great leader in the present days of turmoil. He went so far as to say that he [Dodd] could not think of a time when Robert Byrd would not have been a great leader for our nation. Dodd even cited the era of the Civil War specifically.

Looking back into history, it’s easy to see the stunning conflicts of interest that might not make Byrd such a great leader for America. In his youth, Byrd was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan. You know … the organization that during the Civil War era raped black slave girls, tortured black slave men and mutilated the bodies of any who resisted.

The KKK burned bodies of disobedient blacks, burned the houses of their loved ones, and burned crosses on the front yards of any who would show sympathy to the maltreatment of blacks. And Sen. Dodd said Byrd would have been a “great leader” for America during the time of the Civil War?

But his youth was not the only place where Byrd showed great agitation toward African Americans. In the midst of the 1960s, as America was facing the truth about its darkest secret, the civil-rights movement took center stage. As a nation confessed its sin, and after far too long put the issue of equality and freedom for all back into its core of public policy, Mr. Byrd was again lined up against these principles. As an elected Democrat, when the Civil Rights Act came to the floor for a vote, Byrd found himself advancing the cause of a filibuster to prevent African Americans from enjoying the same civil rights that he enjoyed.

Fast forward to the later part of the senator’s career. In 2001, one would have thought that Sen. Robert Byrd would have learned his lesson. After all these many years of having made mistake after mistake on the issue of the equal treatment of men created in the image of God, he struck again. Appearing on a nationally broadcast television news show, Robert Byrd dropped the always offensive “N” bomb right into America’s living room.

But Sen. Dodd had said that Byrd would have been a “great leader” for America. “He could not think of a time” when Robert Byrd would not have been a “great leader” for America. And understand: This speech was given on the taxpayers dime, in the Senate chamber and publicly broadcast on C-SPAN.

Now remember with me, if you will, the episode of Dec. 6, 2002. Making an appearance at a private birthday gathering (not paid for by taxpayers), then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott spoke words of praise to Strom Thurmond. Thurmond, who was turning 100 years old was praised by Lott as someone that “more Americans should have voted for” when he had run for president on a segregationist ticket at the peak of segregation.

Lott’s remarks went unnoticed for two days by the media, but eventually created such a stir that Republican leadership recognized the pain his comments had caused thousands of Americans and thus removed him from his leadership post.

In only two days, the story had jumped onto the front pages of American newspapers. Black Entertainment Television aired special programming relating to the issue – including bringing Lott on to try to explain. And within a two-week time period, Lott was out as leader and replaced by Sen. Frist, a man whose record on race has no question marks above it.

Today is the eighth day since Sen. Dodd made his remarks implying that a former KKK member would have been a fine leader in the Civil War. It has been now over a week since Christopher Dodd stated that the man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act would be a great leader for all of America. Aside from a fair and balanced report from Fox News, no other news outlet has picked up the story.

So, coming full circle, I asked my listeners this week to explain the media inconsistencies. Tar and feathering Sen. Lott for making similar statements on the one hand, the media outright ignores more inflammatory statements from Sen. Dodd on the other.

One caller seemed to grasp it well: If you are a Democrat and you make openly racist remarks, it’s OK, because you are a Democrat. But if you are a Republican and you make merely questionable statements, you must die a slow, tortuous death as a result.

Evidently, in the minds of Democrats, the answer is: “Of course.”

Research Article: Compulsory visibility and the infralegality of racial phantasmata

Joseph Pugliese

Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia (Received 11 October 2007; final version received 6 November 2008)

I open this article by offering an exposition of Gilles Deleuze’s theorization on the figure of the phantasm. I then proceed to situate this figure within post-9/11 economies of racial profiling focusing, in particular, on the Islam phobic mobilization of the niqab in order to advance arguments premised on differentialist and cultureless racism. Drawing on the work of the British Iranian artist Reza Aramesh, I bring into focus the manner in which radicalizing soma technologies are deployed in order to reproduce racist stereotypes and to foment cultural panics. I conclude by underscoring the structural violence that is at once produced and disavowed by Western liberal democracies in the face of inassimilable others.

Keywords: racial profiling; whiteness; somatechnics; Islam phobia; Arab phobia; culturalist and differentialist racism; terrorism

The animating logic of the phantasm

In his, the logic of sense, Gilles Deleuze stages a comprehensive analysis of the complex ways in which sense and nonsense intersects and collide in the production of meaning and meaninglessness. In the context of his exposition, Deleuze offers a detailed discussion of the phantasm, analyzing its figuration in term of an ‘‘event’’ that problematises binary understandings of the real and the imaginary:

The question of whether particular events are real or imaginary is poorly posed. The distinction is not between the imaginary and the real, but between the events as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about or in which it is actualized. (1990, 210)

Deleuze’s problematizing of the distinction between the real and the imaginary resounds with particular force in a post-9/11 world. Emerging from the event as such  that is, the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City  is something else altogether that cannot be categorized in the either/or category of the real/imaginary: the ‘‘phantasm-event’’ of Islam phobia, constituted by a cluster of Orientalist phantasmatic figures that I will presently discuss in some detail. Orientalism, writes Malek Alloula, ‘‘has set the stage for the deployment of phantasms’’ (1986, 3). Post- 9/11, the event as such produces its serialized phantasms that become corporeally coextensive with the event: the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, the woman wearing a niqab, the man with a turban, the woman behind the hijab, and so on.

These serialized phantasms override the distinction between the one, the event, and the other, the embodied forms that incite it. Deleuze writes:

The phantasm . . . like the event it represents, is a ‘‘noematic attribute’’ distinguished not only from states of affairs and their qualities, but from the psychological and from logical concepts as well. It belongs as such to an ideational surface over which it is produced as an effect. (1990, 211)

As noematic attribute, it can exist in thought alone even as it inscribes an exteriority in order to be perceived as event-effect or ‘‘event-phantasm’’. As such:

It transcends inside and outside, since its topological property is to bring ‘‘its’’ internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold onto a single side. This is why the phantasm-event is submitted to a double causality, referring to the external and internal causes whose result in depth it is, and also to a quasi-cause which ‘‘enacts’’ it at the surface and brings it into communication with all other event-phantasms. (Deleuze 1990, 211)

The event-phantasm, then, is enabled by the topology of the fold, producing a type of mobius strip enfolding of both inside and outside into an ambiguous and spatially indeterminate loop. The double-causality of the event-phantasm marks the generative point of intersection between the noematic experience and the exterior reality that functions to constitute it; ‘‘quasi-cause’’ refers to the fact that the noematic experience of the phantasm can only ever constitute the phantasm-event in a qualified way that is always ‘‘split’’ or marked by the power-in-spacing of a  hyphenated double-causality: neither fully external nor fully internal, the event phantasm straddles both domains as it ‘‘enacts’’ the topology of the fold. To couch it in the terms of the aporetic logic that animates it, the phantasm-event comes into being at the surface that is also its depth. My invocation of the aporia, as a figure of absolute impasse, is sanctioned by Deleuze’s following meditation on the phantasm:

Neither active nor passive, neither internal nor external, neither imaginary nor real, phantasms have indeed the impassability and ideality of the event. In light of this impassability, they inspire in us an unbearable waiting the waiting of that which is going to come about as a result, and also of that which is already in the process of coming about and never stops coming about. (1990, 211)

Post-9/11, this ‘‘unbearable waiting’’ is provoked by the phantasms of the West’s Islam phobia. The condition of unbearable waiting encapsulates the climate of fear, insecurity and anticipation for the terrorist disasters to come. Always already in a state of color-coded alert for the prospective destruction and violence these phantasms will bring to bear, the unbearable waiting is both assuaged and fomented by Western governments in the distribution, in the Australian context for example, of counter-terrorism fridge-magnets with 24-hour security hotlines and, most recently, the exhortation that Sydney citizens individually prepare a ‘‘‘Go Bag’  packed with maps, running shoes, energy bars and even sticky-tape  so they can be ready for any disaster that may strike the city’’ (Creagh 2007, 1). The Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, is exhorting Sydneysiders to prepare a Go Bag because, she says: ‘‘All cities need to be aware of potential terrorism that’s a fact of life now’’ (Creagh 2007, 6). The ‘‘potential of terrorism’’ dramatizes that which, in Deleuzian phantasmatic terms, ‘‘is already in the process of coming about and never stops coming about’’. The ‘‘never stops coming about’’ of the potential of terrorism is precisely what drives the Global War on Terror, a war that, in its endless pursuit of shifting targets and serial phantasms, is structurally without closure and without end.

Within these charged phantasmatic narratives, terrorism is invariably mobilized as a violence-to-come that is inscribed, simultaneously, within the everyday life of the present. I can illustrate the paradoxical structural temporality of terrorism by drawing attention to the various Western color-coded barometers (as deployed in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) that are being used in order to monitor and identify for civilian populations the different degrees of risk and danger of terrorist activity within their respective nations. These national barometers of terrorism situate the futurity of terror within the lived continuum of the present. These barometrical schemas underscore the power of terrorism in terms of an inexhaustible futurity that is destined to erupt in the present. In this sense, the terror of terrorism can be seen to come from a futurity without reserve that cannot be exhausted by the expenditure of any singular act of terror in the present or the past.

In terms of the temporal structure of terrorism that I am tracking here, one could say that it is constituted by the future anterior: in the future, terrorism will already have taken place in the everyday life of the citizen  as Sydney’s Lord Mayor puts it: ‘‘That’s a fact of life now’’. The future anterior temporal modality of terrorism guarantees the impossibility of a horizon of closure precisely because its structure enables the future infinitely to have already erupted traumatically in the present. The temporality of terrorism is constituted by the charge of a diachronic undercurrent of potentiality that can abruptly synchronize violence in the routine present of the everyday. Its eruptive power must, by definition, be inexhaustibly future-oriented, even if the material power of its force can only be fully realized in its violent breach of the present a breach, however, which in its material instantiation can in no way exhaust its future reserves. This is why the ‘‘War on Terror’’ is, by this definition, a war without end. In operating within the temporal schema of a futurity already potentially inscribed in the present, in delineating a futural horizon with no apparent closure, the moving targets of terrorism become serially, opportunistically and phantasmatically substitutable  both geopolitically (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc.) and racially (Arab, Muslim, South Asian, etc.).

Phantasmatic transpositions of culturalist racism: ‘‘in the land of the Niqab’’

In his essay ‘‘Is there a neo-racism?’’, Etienne Balibar proposes that contemporary Western culture is characterized by the growth of what he terms ‘‘culturalist’’ racism. Tracking the transmutations post World War II that have seen biological racism both discredited and legislatively prohibited in most Western countries, Balibar argues that a type of ‘‘racism without race’’ has begun to shape social relations and regimes of representation (Balibar 1991, 23). Balibar terms this form of ‘‘racism without race’’ as ‘‘culturalist’’ or ‘‘differentialist’’ racism; as one can no longer invoke scientific accounts, such as eugenics or anthropometry, of biological and congenital inferiority in order to buttress or justify one’s racist pronouncements or policies, culturalist differences are sought in order to mark a seemingly intractable and irreducible line between the superior Western subject and its inferior other. So, for example, in much contemporary Western discourse Islam phobia is justified by arguing that the ‘‘culture’’ of Islam promotes backward, static and ‘‘medieval’’ societies that are unable to adapt to the dynamic changes of a modernity ‘‘assumed to be universalistic and progressive’’ (Balibar 1991, 25). This hierarchical split along culturalist lines enables the ongoing reproduction and recoding of biological racism, and its attendant unequal relations of power, as it is now revamped under a differentialist guise: ‘‘In this way, we see how the return of the biological theme is permitted and with it the elaboration of new variants of the biological ‘myth’ within the framework of a culturalist racism’’ (Balibar 1991, 26).

Noting that the ‘‘idea of a ‘racism without race’ is not as revolutionary as one might imagine’’, as one of its prototypes has been anti-Semitism, deployed by various Western nations in different xenophobically nationalist forms, Balibar contends that the contemporary context is now marked by both the diffusion and consolidation of culturalist racism (Balibar 1991, 24). For the purposes of this article, I want to cite in some detail the particular manner in which Balibar frames the growth of culturalist racism:

Anti-Semitism is supremely ‘‘differentialist’’ and in many respects the whole of current differentialist racism may be considered, from the formal point of view, as a generalized anti-Semitism. This consideration is particularly important for the interpretation of contemporary Arab phobia . . . since it carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘‘conception of the world’’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and an enterprise of universal ideological domination, and therefore a systematic exclusion of ‘‘Arabness’’ and ‘‘Islamicism’’. (Balibar 1991, 24)

In the Australian context, the virulence of this form of culturalist racism is painstakingly outlined in the report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Isma: Listen, which documents the symbolic and physical violence experienced by Australia’s Arab and/or Muslim citizens and residents:

Physical attacks, threats of physical violence and attempted assaults were widely reported during the consultations. Muslim women were particular targets of physical violence carried out by strangers. Consultation participants reported numerous incidents of women in hijab being spat at, of objects being thrown at them from passing cars and of their hijabs being pulled off. (HREOC 2004, 47)

These testimonies of radicalized violence articulate the manner in which the civic spaces of the nation are becoming off-limits to particular target subjects, as many of the consultation participants experienced acts of race hate on the street, in shopping centers, schools, and so on (Pugliese 2006). In her detailed analysis of the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim race riots that erupted at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach, Suvendrini Perera brings into critical focus the entrenched white supremacist relations of power that were so violently mobilized and deployed in order to exclude figures from entering one of Sydney’s self-declared ‘‘whites-only’’ zones (Perera 2006, 2007). The testimonies collected in the HREOC report document a systemic movement of foreclosure that ensures that select subjects will literally fail to appear within the civic spaces of the nation. This movement of foreclosure must also be seen as one of erasure, in which the institutional nature of racial discrimination will effectively wipe the face of the Arab and/or Muslim from the face of the nation. I refer here to the testimony of a Muslim school student and the fact that ‘‘The school had blacked out the young woman’s hijab in the class photo in an effort to make her blend in with the other non-Muslim girls’’: ‘‘I spoke to the photographer and he blamed the principal, and I spoke to the principal and he blamed the photographer. The principal in the end said: ‘Well, she stood out too much’’’ (HREOC 2004, 86). The virulence of ongoing assimilationist demands, underpinned by a symbolically violent Islam phobia, is encapsulated in this student’s testimony, where the marker of religion-cultural difference, the hijab, must be literally erased within the context of the annual school photograph.

In this context, the hijab becomes a racially charged phantasm-event: as phantasm, it is at once absent from the visual plane of the photograph, having been rendered invisible through the process of digital erasure; simultaneously, for the student, her hijab is graphically marked by its very absence: it is ‘‘there’’ in the very impossibility of being visually represented. As such, it is a phantasm-event that is at once imaginary and real, haunting the forcibly assimilated figure of the Muslim girl, drawing attention to what Deleuze so appositely terms the ‘‘corporeal state of affairs  which incites it’’ (1990, 240) and which, simultaneously, disallows it from being actualized. Wrenched from its religious context, the hijab is instrumentalized into a somatechnics of unassimilable culturalist difference.1 Somatechnics refers to the in dissociable way in which the body of a subject is always already technologized and mediated by cultural inscriptions. In the West, this somatechnologisation of unassimilable culturalist difference can be seen to be operative across the broad spectrum of cultural artifacts inscribed by the sign ‘‘Islam’’, including the black beard, the hijab, the headscarf and the niqab.

The somatechnologisation of the niqab as embodied signifier of unassimilable cultural difference is graphically evidenced in Paul Sheehan’s (2007) ‘‘Mind the gap, where trouble brews’’. Sheehan is an Australian journalist who, over the past decade, has become somewhat of a national spokesperson on matters of race, assimilation and the dangers of multiculturalism. Sheehan’s articles are presented as analyses of what Balibar terms ‘‘crowd psychology’’. ‘‘It is not by chance’’, writes Balibar,

that the theories of differentialist racism . . . here connect with ‘‘crowd psychology,’’ which is enjoying something of a revival, as a general explanation of irrational movements, aggression and collective violence, and particularly, of xenophobia . . . The neo-racist ideologues are not mystical heredity theorists, but ‘‘realist’’ technicians of social psychology. (Balibar 1991, 23)

In Sheehan’s article, the niqab, as embodied somatechnics of unassimilable Islam, functions as the metonym through which the realist technician of social psychology can safely encode his Islam phobia. The article begins thus:

While car bombs were being prepared in London and Glasgow, I was visiting the land of the niqab, communities in England but not of England, where I was usually the only white person on the street, where the veil and the beard are the norm, and where sharia law holds greater authority than English common law. I was in East London, Bradford, Dewsbury, all bastions of the niqab. The niqab is the veil which covers the entire face of a woman, except for a slit for the eyes. (Sheehan 2007, 13)

The ‘‘only white man on the street’’ signals the shocking reversal of the natural order of things: white England, a once taken-for-granted tautology, is now no longer self-identical to itself. The white man has become a minority, an outsider in his own domain as the ex-colonial Black/South Asian subject has become the dominant figure on the streets. Autochthonic whiteness has been both displaced and overrun by the colored other. Reproducing the authoritative voice of the white anthropologist entering the exotic and dangerous lands of the colonial frontier, Sheehan Orientalises and metonymically homogenizes Britain’s Islamic communities into ‘‘the land of the niqab’’. ‘‘The land of the niqab’’ invokes that stock catalogue of colonial to poi of Oriental exoticism and otherness. The niqab becomes, like the hijab, ‘‘a nodal fixation’’ that self-evidently embodies ‘‘the most pernicious components of oppressive patriarchal backward cultures and traditions, those that have failed at modernity’’ (Puar 2007, 181). ‘‘The land of the niqab’’ enunciates, in Frantz Fanon’s incisive terms, that ‘‘zone of occult instability where the people dwell’’ (1976, 182). Traversing this zone of occult instability, the white anthropologist social psychologist proceeds to diagnose the pathological phenomenon of Islam in a British cultural context.

Intertwined with the attempted suicide bomber attacks in London and Glasgow, the niqab is framed within a network of explosive terrorism. This tropic turn transmutes an item of religious clothing into a soma technology of incipient terror, threat and absolute otherness. ‘‘The niqab’’, explains the pseudo-anthropologist, ‘‘is the veil which covers the entire face of a woman, except for the slit for the eyes’’. As soma technology, the niqab here signifies a garment that refuses the colonial gaze. Entirely occluding the face of the Islamic woman except for a ‘‘slit for the eyes’’, it deflects the penetrative gaze of the West, even as it enables the occluded subject agentically to return the gaze without herself being scopically exposed. Driving Sheehan’s fetishisation of the niqab is what Medya Yegenoglu describes as the Orientalist interlacing of ‘‘the discourse of Enlightenment (characterized by the privileging of reason, truth, and progress) and the scopic regime of modernity (characterized by the valorization of the visual)’’ (1999, 108). For Sheehan, contemporary British Muslim women cannot, structurally, occupy the locus of Enlightenment (with all its attendant progressive values) and still be veiled in their niqabs or hijabs: the one structurally precludes the other; as such, an act of ocular centric divestment must take place if British Muslim women are to be brought into the civic fold of British Enlightenment culture.

Sheehan’s article is invested in fomenting a xenophobic politics: there is something abnormal and unnatural about the fact that the ‘‘veil and the beard are the norm’’ in these British streets. One cannot be both British and Muslim: ‘‘the land of the niqab’’, writes Sheehan, is constituted by ‘‘communities that are in England but not of England’’. Moreover, in keeping with their Oriental proclivities, British Muslims are represented as not observing the rule of British law: with no supporting evidence, Sheehan frames British Muslims as, tout court, placing Sharia law above English common law. This seditious behavior is reinforced by Sheehan’s use of the military metaphor of the ‘‘bastion’’; by qualifying bastion with the niqab, Sheehan militarizes this item of religious apparel, something that is made explicit when he terms the niqab ‘‘the symbol of revolt’’ (2007, 13). The niqab, as ‘‘symbol of revolt’’, once situated in its anti-colonial genealogies (e.g., Algerian female suicide bombers) is precisely what cannot be countenanced by the liberal subject, as it graphically brings into focus the contestation of the disavowed violences that ensure the continuation of colonial rule. Fleshing out the subtext that informs his text, Sheehan’s article exudes a nostalgic sense of postcolonial loss, white fear and anxiety: the once-white Christian suburbs of ‘‘East London, Bradford, Dewsbury, [are now] all bastions of the niqab’’, land of the Muslim/colored/seditious/terrorist other. In this charged context: ‘‘Islam phobia defines them [women who wear the niqab and the hijab] as ‘subversive’ and they have to cope with their ascribed identities of the enemy within’’ (Afshar, Aitken, and Franks 2005, 277; see also Mahmood 2005; Motha 2007). Paul Gilroy diagnoses this sense of postcolonial loss in terms of a ‘‘pathology’’ that deserves ‘‘the proper name of ‘postimperial melancholia’’’, inscribed by the ‘‘guilt-ridden loathing and depression that have come to characterize Britain’s xenophobic responses to the strangers who have intruded upon it more recently’’ (2005, 90).

The unsubstantiated claim that in these English suburbs ‘‘sharia law holds greater authority than English common law’’ positions British Muslim subjects as having already implicitly violated the rule of English common law before the fact. Operative here is a type of quasi-illegality or incipient criminality that functions to constitute subjects who always already resemble the crimes they have not actually perpetrated but are always already in danger of committing. I say ‘‘resemble’’ as the niqab and the beard here signify, in Sheehan’s article, somatechnic metonyms of an incipient criminality. The niqab and the beard function, in Michel Foucault’s terms, as ‘‘a way of linking together, simply through analogy, a whole series of illegalities below the threshold, of improper acts that are not illegal, and of piling them up in order to make them resemble the crime itself ’’ (2003, 19). The niqab, the hijab and the beard embody the threat of so many illegalities that bristle just below the social threshold and that, analogically, come to represent the somatechnics of crimes that will have always already been committed in advance of the fact; these surface effects are framed precisely in terms of the corporeal state of affairs that, phantasmatically, incite that which will always already be actualized: terror, violence, illegality and recalcitrant unassimilability.

Zones of occult instability and prosthetic white citizenship ‘‘in the land of the Niqab’’

Sheehan observes:

I’ve just been sharing . . . streets and markets with scores of women hidden behind black niqabs, quite a powerful social statement, but these women were in Tower Hamlets in London, Mannigham in Bradford, Savile Town in Dewsbury, and in shopping centers in Luton and Leeds. (2007, 13)

This is the scandal that haunts Sheehan’s article: that British Muslim women dressed in the niqab are to be found in such civic spaces as British streets, markets and shopping centers. In traversing and occupying such public spaces, British Muslim women breach the tacit radicalized order of space that is at once also gendered: precisely as identifiably British Muslim women, they refuse to be confined to the circumscribed zone of the domestic sphere (the home) and proceed, scandalously, to assert their freedom of movement as rights-bearing subjects in public spaces: streets, markets and shopping centers. Inscribed in Sheehan’s amazement that British Muslim women are traversing and occupying these urban public spaces is the implicit radicalized fissure that remains operative but unsaid: British Muslim women dressed in the niqab cannot, by definition, be British rights-bearing subjects and Muslim at one and the same time.

‘‘In England but not of England’’ dramatizes the problematic of passing as citizen-subject in the eyes of the white supremacist. Where the category of citizenship is, by tacit definition, defined by whiteness, subjects of color can only take up citizenship in a prostheticized way. As I have argued elsewhere (Pugliese 2005b), the critical power in conceptualizing race in terms of a prosthesis lies in the way in which it effectively dislocates race from its biological ground, as a type of naturalized biological datum, in order to disclose its status as techne`; that is, as a biopolitical soma technology of power. Whiteness is here understood not in terms of a biologically essentialized attribute, exclusively determined by one’s phenotypical features (color of skin, texture of hair, etc.); rather, whiteness must be seen to operate in terms of a transnational technology of radicalized power that is simultaneously contingent upon specific sites, subjects and relations. Whiteness, as Vron Ware argues, ‘‘is not reducible to skin color but refers to ways of thinking and behaving ‘steeped’ in histories of raciology’’ (2001, 205).

In the face of the problematic of ‘‘being in England but of not England’’, British citizens of color can only inhabit the fraught and contingent category of what I term ‘‘prosthetic white citizenship’’. Prosthetic white citizenship is what is conferred upon non-white subjects of the white nation. As a prosthetic, it is a citizenship that cannot be corporeally owned or nativized as the prosthetic of white citizenship remains visibly an adjunct to the non-white body. The hijab, the niqab, the Muslim cap or the black beard always give away the merely prostheticized citizen-subject. Understood within the doxic binaries of common-sense epistemologies, prosthetic white citizenship is not of the body (and thus ‘‘not of England’’/body politic of the white nation); rather, as techne` (technology) in opposition to physis (the natural), it can never be corporeally nativized. Prosthetic white citizenship, as a technology of biopower, is always imposed or conferred from the outside (of the body); as white techne`, it can only ever be taken up by its non-white subjects as simulation, precisely as a type of prosthetic or phantasmatic limb that always discloses its adjunct status as non-native artifice. Even as prosthetic white citizenship can be conferred upon non-white subjects, it can, precisely because it is viewed in terms of an artificial adjunct to the non-white subject, be withheld or taken away. I refer here, in the Australian context, to the recent deportation of the non-white Australian citizen, Vivian Alvarez Solon, back to the Philippines by Australian immigration officials who ‘‘misrecognised’’ her as an illegal immigrant, and to the recent report documenting the wrongful imprisonment of up to 10 Australian residents, including children and the mentally ill, within Immigration Detention Centers over the past few years (Pugliese 2007).

‘‘In Whitechapel, within sight of the City of London, the financial centre of Europe’’, writes Sheehan, ‘‘women in niqabs are common at the market. They retrieve their children from the Osmani Primary School then disappear into the rows of council houses nearby’’ (2007, 13). Throughout Sheehan’s article, British Muslim women dressed in the niqab appear as unnatural intruders illegitimately occupying Britain’s civic spaces and as haunting specters disrupting the natural order of things. A woman in a niqab in sight of the City of London is an unnatural sighting: it cannot be anything other than a phantasm, at once mysteriously appearing and disappearing, traversing that ‘‘zone of occult instability’’ constituted by the racial other. Sheehan’s representation of British Muslim women wearing niqabs in terms of radicalized phantasmata is visually underscored by the illustration that accompanies his article (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. British Muslim women in niqabs on a Petri dish.

Underscoring the profound sense of white supremacist and postcolonial loss that imbues this article, Sheehan concludes by drawing attention to ‘‘the tragedy of modern Britain’’: ‘‘The result is that Britain has become the centre of Islamic terrorism in Europe and a Petri dish of Muslim insularity’’ (Sheehan 2007, 13). In clinical terms, the Petri dish is that shallow, circular glass receptacle in which scientists breed and experiment on bacteria and other low-life organisms. Analogically, British Muslim women are represented as equivalent to pathogenic life. The ‘‘pathogens’’ in the illustration accompanying Sheehan’s text are all shown as dressed in the niqab. The gendered dimensions of this biopolitical analogy cannot be overestimated: Muslim women are the low-life ‘‘breeders’’ instrumental in reproducing a pathogenic population scripted as the cause of ‘‘the tragedy of modern Britain’’. Ichnographically, British Muslim women wearing their niqabs are symbolically inserted within the domains of pathogenic biology, colonial teratology and radicalized phantasmata. As biopolitical monsters, they visually reanimate the teratological figure of King Kong, a primitive colonial mutant who comes to haunt the centre of the imperial metropolis, wreaking violence and destruction. Looming above the heart of the city of London, they overshadow the key to poi of British civic life: the Houses of Parliament, the very symbol of British democracy and the rule of law; Westminster Abbey, an iconic symbol of Christian Britain; and the skyscrapers of the financial district stretching off into the distance. These pathogenic, monstrous black figures embody the ‘‘crowned anarchies’’ of phantasmata, threatening disorder, destruction and conquest’’ (Deleuze 1990, 263), even as they embody the Muslim-terrorist vengeance of those ‘‘that have failed at modernity’’ (Puar 2007, 181) and who are determined to destroy it.

As phantasmata, they invoke the phantasm-event of Islam phobia post 9/11, inspiring ‘‘an unbearable waiting’’ for putative acts of terror that, to paraphrase Deleuze, are already in the process of coming about and never stop coming about Figure 1. British Muslim women in niqabs on a Petri dish.  (1990, 211). In keeping with what Deleuze identifies as the ‘‘demonic’’ logic of the phantasm, the ‘‘most concealed’’ here, the fully-veiled Muslim woman becomes, in this illustration, ‘‘the most manifest’’ (Deleuze 1990, 258 and 8). The British Muslim women in their black niqabs soma technologically embody the attributes of the phantasm: they are visually represented as ‘‘emanations which travel in the atmosphere [of central London] with agility’’ (Deleuze 1990, 217). As black phantasmata dominating the white cityscape of the city, they operate ‘‘undercover of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion’’ of British common law merely by their presence. Animating the Petri dish of central London is ‘‘the vertigo’’ of Muslim phantasms that, as forms of viral low-life, are now out of control. The phantasm, writes Deleuze, is ‘‘the effect of the functioning of the simulacrum as machinery’’ (1990, 263); as machined serial figures that lack individuating identity, all Muslim women dressed in their niqabs are serially interchangeable. As figures that are impenetrable to Sheehan’s phallocentric-colonial gaze, they emerge in both his text and the accompanying illustration as so many phantasmagoric ‘‘sign[s] issued in the process of signalization . . . in the sense of a ‘costume’ [the niqab], or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another’’ (Deleuze 1990, 263).

Visually, this illustration buttresses Sheehan’s position as white social scientist clinically examining the pathogenic Muslim low-life that is ‘‘breeding’’ in Britain and that stands to threaten and overturn its liberal-democratic institutions. What is exposed in Sheehan’s use of the analogy of the Petri dish, and in the accompanying illustration, is the manner in which differentialist racism effectively reproduces familiar forms of biological racism, even as it pretends to be doing otherwise. Where the niqab is mobilized by Sheehan merely to symbolize the unassimilability of Muslim culture, through the use of the biopolitical metaphor of the Petri dish it becomes precisely as a soma technology of radicalized difference coextensive with traditional forms of biological racism. Situated in the symbolically charged metaphor of the Petri dish, the veiled British Muslim women dressed in their niqabs represent ‘‘iconic ciphers of Europe’s postcolonial melancholia’’ (Gilroy 2004, xvii) that, in this context, signify the abject failure of Britain’s multicultural ‘‘experiment’’: the ‘‘experiment’’ with multicultural difference in the Petri dish of contemporary postcolonial Britain has produced nothing but infralegal phantasmata, terrorists and anti-civil monsters. This is the object lesson to be learned by other societies foolish enough to dabble with the ‘‘experiment’’ of multiculturalism; this failed experiment functions to justify, in Paul Gilroy’s terms, ‘‘pessimistic responses to the nightmare of multiculture’’ (2004, xvii).

The ‘‘tragedy of Britain’’, Sheehan laments, pivots on ‘‘the issue of reciprocity’’:

when a society, such a Britain and every society in the developed West, provides freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom from oppression by the state, plus social security benefits and medical care, the implicit social contract is that there is reciprocity between the community and civil society. In Islamic communities, however, reciprocity is a problem. Because there is but one God, Allah, and his teachings dictate every aspect of life and social organization. This is a schism. (Sheehan 2007, 13)

The ‘‘schism’’ that Sheehan identifies in actual fact exposes the double standards and inequalities of Western liberalism. As J.V. D’Cruz and William Steele argue, ‘‘Liberalism is a sham if it would have us believe that in principle all people are morally equal and should have equal opportunities’’ (2003, 46), when in fact social relations in Western societies are structured by hierarchies and inequities of access that discriminate against certain subjects in term of race, gender, sexuality, class and (dis)ability. What D’Cruz and Steele underscore in their analysis of liberalism is that it is in fact riven by an historical double standard: ‘‘The non-discriminating core of traditional liberalism could only have been conceived abstractly, oblivious to historical inequality and injustice among peoples, including discrimination, slavery and colonialism’’ (2003, 46). It is the insistent manner in which liberalism abstracts and effaces the historical materiality of radicalized, gendered, sexualized, (dis)abled and classed bodies that enables the myth of communities that are all situated on an equal playing field and are therefore bound by the same ‘‘social contract’’. As Uday Mehta argues, in order to preserve the mythos of a social contract predicated on equality, what must be effected is the ‘‘sequestering of the abstract foundations of liberalism from its institutional commitments’’ to social (in)equality (1999, 79).

In emphasizing the manner in which liberalism has been instrumental in the dissemination and maintenance of Western empires, Mehta draws attention to its effaced eschatological dimensions:

the posture of liberal thought toward the world is judgmental. It is a corollary, if not a concrete implication, of this idea that it is also an evangelical posture in which the burning spirit has been that of politics and the eschatology of progress. (1999, 79)

Mehta brilliantly identifies here the judgmental and evangelical posture that informs Sheehan when faced by the embodied figures of cultural difference that appear to be recalcitrant to his assimilationist eschatology of progress. Saba Mahmood underlines the disavowed violence that underpins liberalism’s coercive moves ‘‘to reduce yet again all that remains irreconcilable into the trope of a shared humanity and its assumed teleological futurity’’ (2005, 199). Situated in this liberalassimilationist schema of a failed eschatology, the niqab, for Sheehan, symbolizes the ‘‘unseemliness of difference’’ that, in Mahmood’s words, can ‘‘not be synthesized’’ (2005, 198).

The entirety of Sheehan’s piece is governed by an a priori field of Eurocentric disciplinary normativity. Within the grid of this disciplinary field, British Muslims are positioned as the interlopers, the visibly prosthetic citizen-subjects and mutant monstrous phantasms that radiate a diffuse, tacit, quasi-illegality or, put in Foucauldian terms, a pernicious infralegality. Already marked by the unsubstantiated assertion that, in their communities, ‘‘sharia law holds greater authority than English common law’’, British Muslims’ cultural practices are inscribed, irrationally, by a series of infralegal analogies: their dress, their beard, the fact that they ‘‘retrieve their children from Osmani Primary school then disappear into rows of council houses nearby’’, their ‘‘lack of reciprocity’’, and so on. Situated within the schema of differentialist racism, these infralegal analogies represent ‘‘kinds of miniature warning signs . . . that are presented as already analogous to crime’’ (Foucault 2003, 23). As such, Sheehan’s article must be seen as part of the larger machinery of a contemporary transnational white supremacism, fomenting xenophobia, fear and suspicion, even as it self-represents as a liberal heartfelt call for ‘‘reciprocity between community and civil society’’. As Tahir Abbas argues:

After 9/11, and certainly after 7/7 [London bombings], a whole host of factors have negatively impacted on British Muslims. These include increasing anti-terrorist measures, greater policing powers, racial and ethnic profiling in the criminal justice system, civil society debates around culture that place South Asian Muslims at its heart, although never explicitly, and questions around the apparent unassimilability of Muslims, with a focus on ‘‘community cohesion’’. (2007, 292)

Underpinning this concern with ‘‘community cohesion’’ is a tacit understanding of a ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ that is both ‘‘proprietary [and] Eurocentric’’ in its assimilative and normative demands (Perera 2008, 139). In other words, the veiled Muslim woman embodies, at one and the same time, ‘‘women’s oppression as ‘categorical proof of Islamic terror’’’ (Perera 2008, 141) and the figure of incipient terror who will overturn the fundamental axioms of the enlightened liberal nation-state.

In the course of his article, Sheehan draws attention to the ‘‘disturbing’’ fact that the London suicide bombers were native born subjects ‘‘who turned to mass murder’’ and who, together with the Glasgow car bombs, ‘‘have merely added to the long list of murders and attempted murders that have afflicted Britain in the name of Allah during the past decade’’ (2007, 13). As I have argued elsewhere, post 7/7, the white British media’s scripting of the fact that the London suicide bombers were native-born in terms of a ‘‘chilling’’ and ‘‘shocking’’ fact functioned effectively to erase white Britain’s long and bloody imperial history of native-born terrorists, dispatched in the time of empire to the four corners of the globe in order to ensure the ‘‘pacification’’ of its subject peoples (Pugliese 2006). This is the violent history that simply cannot figure in contemporary accounts of British terrorism without rupturing the veneer of moral self-righteousness that constitutes British liberal ‘‘civil society’’.

Sheehan’s Islam phobic attack on British Muslim women who wear the niqab is mobilized in terms of an object lesson for Australia’s non-Muslim citizenry its subtext is: Australia is at risk of terrorist attacks that will be launched by its own Australian Muslim subjects and their prospective destruction of the nation’s social contract and liberal body politic. As such, it must be inserted within a cluster of Islam phobic pronouncements that have been articulated by prominent Australian politicians. National Party senator John Stone has called for the

virtual ‘‘halting’’ of the ‘‘Muslim immigrant inflow.’’ In Quadrant last September [2006], he referred to the ‘‘Islamic cancer in our body politic.’’ Pauline Hanson is planning to run for the Senate in Queensland for Pauline Hanson’s United Australia Party. Her sole policy appears to be a moratorium on Muslim immigration. Fred Nile, leader of the Christian Democrats in NSW [New South Wales], has advocated the same cause. (Henderson 2007, 13)

Finally, the suburban dimensions of this Islam phobia, situated in the context of the Petri dish ‘‘failed experiment’’ of multiculturalism, can be seen in recent reports that real-estate agents in the Sydney suburb of Camden had held meetings debating

the issue of selling homes to Muslim families wanting to relocate to the area. The news came as some residents voiced outrage about the [proposed Islamic] school, with at least three businesses organizing petitions against the Quranic Society bid to build Camden College, a combined primary and secondary school with 1200 students. (Cuming and Marcus 2007, 11)

Compulsory visibility: the radicalized somatechnics of the balaclava

On 24 April 2007, a report was released on the New South Wales police’s ongoing use of the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’. The report stated that:

NSW police use the description Middle Eastern too frequently in media releases, skewing the perception of crime rates and contributing to racial tensions . . . The report said up to two-thirds of the police media releases that mentioned ethnicity referred to suspects of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance. This was a disproportionate use, said Peter El Khouri, a member of the council [that released the report] . . . ‘‘There is a perception that the Middle Eastern community, Australians of Middle Eastern background, are significantly responsible for the crime in the state,’’ Mr. El Khouri said. (Tadros 2007, 3)

Located in the context of the Global War on Terror, the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ has become symbolic of a taken-for-granted criminal status (Pugliese 2003, 2005a). What object, however, functions automatically to symbolize this ethnic descriptor, its criminal status and the cluster of emotions (fear, anxiety, and terror) that it generates in the general public? Embedded in the above-cited report on police overuse of this ethnic descriptor is this extraordinary disclosure: ‘‘The [NSW police] service constantly ignores its policy on the use of ethnic descriptions and has even issued releases referring to suspects wearing balaclavas as being of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance’’ (Tadros 2007, 3; emphasis added). Articulated in this disclosure is the symbolic conflation of an object (balaclava) with a radicalized ethnic identity (of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance) that marks a criminal figure in advance of the fact of his or her having committed any crime. Operative here is a radicalized somatechnics of identity in the service of cultural panics. The face of a figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is, in this context, already interchangeable with the soma technology of the balaclava precisely as symbol of the terrorist and the criminal. The radicalized phenotypical features of the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ are already tautological in their relation to that hyperbolic symbol of terror: the balaclava. The textural contours and chromatics of the balaclava articulate the phenotypical morphology of the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, regardless of the fact the mask occludes the actual phenotypical identificatory features of the face. In other words, the balaclava is a soma technology precisely because it biopolitically intextuates an ethnic descriptor onto the face of the target subject.

The naming of the balaclava by the New South Wales police as metonymically interchangeable with the ethnic descriptor ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ articulates the ultimate ruse of un/masking: in effect, there is never any unmasking of the terrorist as such, since the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ cannot be, structurally, unmasked to strip away the balaclava is already to impose the ethnic descriptor that the mask signifies. The aporia of this double movement in fact constitutes a double bind for the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’: she or he cannot be read, in the context of the West’s cultural panic over this figure, as a citizen-subject who is innocent of having perpetrated a crime until proven guilty by due legal process. On the contrary, the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is precluded from occupying that locus. In advance of the fact of having committed any crime, they are already criminalized: the phenotypicality of their face-as-balaclava proxy evidences as much; recursively, the soma technology of balaclava-as-ethnic descriptor proxy (re)iterates the same.

Perhaps nothing more powerfully illustrates this point, and the personal cost of embodying this radicalized double bind, than the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor working in a Brisbane hospital who was wrongly charged by Australian Federal police on terrorism offences. On 2 July 2007, Haneef was arrested and imprisoned for ‘‘recklessly’’ providing assistance to a terrorist organization by leaving his mobile SIM card with his cousin, Sabeel Ahmed, one of the Glasgow bombers, when he left Britain in July 2006. Haneef’s Australian visa was subsequently cancelled and he was threatened with deportation. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Damian Bugg, after a review of Haneef’s case, declared the alleged use of Haneef’s SIM card in the Glasgow bombing to be an ‘‘error of fact’’. Haneef returned to India voluntarily, is currently unemployed, and has commenced court proceedings in order to have his Australian work visa reinstated (ABC News 2007). Furthermore:

More than a year after a terrorism charge against him was dropped and more than $8 million later, the Australian Federal Police have finally confirmed that they have cleared the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef as a suspect in last year’s terrorism attack on Glasgow airport. (Sydney Morning Herard 2008, 1)

In advance of the fact of having committed any proven criminal offence, on his arrest Haneef was paraded across the Australian media as a terrorist caught by the expertise of the Australian police. Photographed in the cell of a police armored wagon, stripped of civilian clothes, wearing a nondescript sack, his hands manacled and his head between his legs, Haneef was publicly ‘‘unmasked’’ as a terrorist. After the collapse of the government’s case against Haneef, despite the fact the court declared there was insufficient evidence to go to trial and that his visa should be reinstated, Haneef was still publicly represented by the government in terms of a terrorist suspect, regardless of the fact that they could not produce any evidence to substantiate this claim. In other words, released by the courts, rein scribed within the garb of civilian clothes, Haneef was still symbolically compelled to ‘‘wear’’ his balaclava mask of criminal/terrorist. Black of beard, dark of eye, swarthy-skinned this was sufficient evidence to prove the phenotypicality of his face-as-balaclava proxy of a criminal/terrorist.

The differentialist racist terrain that I have been traversing has been brilliantly mapped in the sardonic artwork of the Iranian British artist Reza Aramesh. Across a number of installations, Aramesh has brought into critical focus the radicalized charge of the face of Middle Eastern appearance-as-balaclava proxy for criminalization. In his Carboot Sale: Palm Trees Sold (Figure 2), Aramesh has three suited, balaclava masked figures situated in the space of an actual car-boot sale held in a warehouse in East London. Within the parameters of this civic-mercantile space, Aramesh mobilized three men of Middle Eastern background (a doctor, a television and film producer, and a criminal lawyer) and had them don balaclavas as they ‘‘illegally’’ hawked their wares: palm trees sold from a car boot.

Figure 2. Reza Aramesh, Carboot Sale: Palm Trees Sold, 2004.

As Orientalized metonyms of the Middle East, the palm trees are the ‘‘hot’’ merchandise that stand in contradistinction to the cool artwork that hangs on the walls. Aramesh, however, overturns this dichotomy by playing on the in dissociable double bind that inscribes the logic of the mask. On the one hand, the balaclava- masked men tautologically signify criminal non-citizen Middle Eastern subjects who can only appear within the context of civic spaces as always already criminal types, in contradistinction to the unmasked citizen-subjects milling around them and their palm trees. Yet Aramesh’s work brings into crisis the very rhetorical status of the mask: if a balaclava is at once tautological in terms of a particular phenotypical configuration of racist stereotypes and ethnic descriptors, the viewer is compelled to ask: what ‘‘masks’’ are the seemingly unmasked citizen-subjects also inscribed with? What are the phenotypical features of a face that allow a subject the privilege to occupy a civic space untrammelled by racist stereotypes? What radicalized features are so privileged within raciological relations of power that the cultural inscription/mask of one’s phenotypicality is effectively invisibilized? In other words, what are the biopolitical relations of power that enable one traverse civic spaces as though one were not wearing a mask  that is, as though one’s face were not always already soma technologically intextuated by a cluster of biopolitical significations? Aramesh further amplifies the complex logic of the double bind that inscribes the mask-as non-mask in his use of the palms as Orientalized proxies of illegality and criminality. The illegal status of the palms, as ‘‘hot’’ merchandise that is being sold by self evidently criminal types, is at once resignified by their location in a civic space: their very status as illegal booty is simultaneously resignified as they become artworks reflexively commenting on the processual nature of politico-cultural construction and commodification.

Figure 3. Reza Aramesh, The Eternal Spring, 2004.

The figure of the balaclava-as proxy for the face ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ is, in Aramesh’s The Eternal Spring, contextualized within the private space of the home (Figure 3). Even within the confines of this private space, Aramesh suggests that the logic of the radicalized mask is inescapable. His staging of a choreography of relaxed and homely postures lounging, kneeling, reclining is problematises by the somatechnics of the balaclava. As the soma technology of the balaclava is fused to a set of radicalized phenotypical features, it becomes impossible to remove it even within the domestic confines of one’s home space. In this sense, the homely atmosphere of this domestic scene is already rendered unhomely, uncanny. A spectrality of threat and violence haunts this scene. None of the domestic objects the hookah, the Oriental rug; the flowers can vitiate this sense of threat. The very fact that one of the male figures is unmasked only serves to confirm this fact: enmeshed within the charged choreography of visibly masked figures, he represents the embodied tautology of the balaclava-as-proxy-for-the-criminal-face-of-Middle-Eastern-appearance.

In the play of mirrors, the naked figure of the woman embodies the stereotypical gendered dimensions of this double logic of the mask-as-truth. A reflection caught in double reflections, the naked figure of the woman signifies the Nietzschean burden of the untruth of truth, of the appearance of all reality:

There is no such thing as the essence of woman because woman averts, she is averted herself. Out of the depths . . . she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity and property . . . There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that untruth of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is ‘‘truth’’. (Derrida 1993, 51)

The reflection of the naked woman in Aramesh’s image stages the rhetoricity and literality of this gendered and Orientalized double logic. Her literal turning away from the men and the spectator instantiates the tropological dimensions of this turn. Through this move, the cliché´ of one of Western philosophy’s ‘‘eternal verities’’ is both performed and mocked in the embodied gendered reflection of ‘‘eternal spring’’ as appearance (reflection) of appearance (image): she averts in order to underscore this rhetorical undoing of essentiality and identity: to be unmasked is already to be masked. Doubling this effect, the unmasked young man with averted gaze echoes as much.

The double turns and aversions the woman away from the men and the men from the naked woman instantiate, in turn, a queer scene of desire. In her comprehensive tracking of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and ‘‘terrorist assemblages’’, Jasbir Puar asks:

What is queer about the terrorist? And what is queer about terrorist corporealities? The depictions of masculinity most rapidly disseminated and globalized at this historical juncture are terrorist masculinities: failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and the body  homosexuality . . . (2007, xxiii)

In the frame of this queer scene of terror and desire, the terrorist is the homosexual positioned in a network of homoerotic poses supine, kneeling with hands on crotch and spread-eagled and sideways looks. Their gaze averted (no backward glance here) from the naked woman, she becomes, in this queer choreography, the ‘‘reference point of malfunction’’, underscoring their failed heterosexuality and their perverse homosexuality.

Aramesh brilliantly dramatizes the symbolically violent logic of this radicalized, gendered and sexualized terrorist economy in So You’re Afraid of What: Avi on a Bed of Roses (Figure 4). Representing the figure of a hooded Avi lolling and sexually available on a bed of rose petals, the image at once invokes and satires the radicalized attributes of iconic white heteronormative American beauty. Poster boy Avi embodying a swarthy, hirsute and queer un-American beauty cannot, even in this most intimate of moments, be divested of his mask of terror. The logic of the balaclava-as-proxy for the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’ precludes the possibility of removing what has been soma technically sutured to the racially profiled flesh of the target subject. In this image, Aramesh provocatively exposes the way in which queerness, in Puar’s words, ‘‘is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist’’: ‘‘It is not that we must engage in the practice of excavating the queer terrorist, or queering the terrorist; rather, queerness is always already installed in queering the terrorist’’ (2007, xxiv). Aramesh graphically dramatizes the a priori status of a queerness that pre-originality inflects the phantasm-event of the terrorist. The title of Aramesh’s image polysemically interrogates what is at stake in these queer economies indissociably inscribed by the vectors of race, sexuality and gender. What exactly is the locus of terror/desire in this image? What parts of desire remain scandalous and unnamable in this naked act of exposure and solicitation? So you’re afraid of what? Your disavowed homoerotic fantasies of the swarthy-balaclava-cladhomo- Arab-Muslim-terrorist lolling on a bed of roses? Describing another image altogether, the image of a figure in Osama bin Laden drag, Puar’s reflections appositely elucidate Aramesh’s image: ‘‘Visually, the body reclaims the faggotry, the effeminacy, the failed masculinity, always already installed in the naming of the terrorist, staging further defiance in the face of such easily rendered accusations of being a terrorist’’ (Puar 2007, 14). Lolling on his bed of roses, Avi at once interrogates and solicits the violence of categorical positionings, radicalized descriptors and disavowed queer economies of unspeakable desire.

Figure 4. Reza Aramesh, So You’re Afraid of What: Avi on a Bed of Roses, 2004.

In effect, what Aramesh draws attention to throughout this series of images is the manner in which the figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’, whether it be the woman dressed in the niqab or hijab, or the swarthy man with a black beard, are compelled by white supremacist regimes to live lives marked by ‘‘compulsory visibility’’ (Foucault 1982, 187). In coining this term, Foucault refers to the way in which disciplinary power demands that its subjects be ‘‘constantly seen’’ in order to hold them ‘‘in a mechanism of objectification’’ and subjection (1982, 187). Transposing Foucault’s term to contemporary regimes of Islam phobia and Arab phobia, the disciplinary mechanism of compulsory visibility inscribes racially profiled and targeted subjects within scopic economies of hyper-surveillance. In the context of these economies of hyper-surveillance, British or Australian Muslims and/ or Arabs become coextensive with their racially marked metonyms: the niqab, for example, operates at once to insert Muslim women within scopic regimes of compulsory visibility that mark them as prime targets of race hate and violence, whilst simultaneously marking them as infralegal criminals who will breach the contract of the Western liberal state. Placed under relentless and constant watch because of their infralegal suspect status, racially-profiled colored subjects can neither inhabit the tautological category of white-citizen-subject nor enjoy the civil liberties and rights of white ‘‘invisibility’’ that automatically accrue to this racially privileged subject. Whereas for them the category of (white) citizen-subject can only be lived as a mere prosthetic, the violent soma technologies of racial profiling and ethnic descriptors are, conversely, precisely what they embody autochthonously.

Moreover, these regimes of compulsory visibility need to be complicated by the tacit knowledges that antedate the actual process of catching sight of somebody in the field of vision. These tacit knowledges, as precognitive, are inscribed by what Puar terms ‘‘regimes of affect and tactility [that] conduct vital information beyond the visual’’ and that enable the move from ‘‘looks like’’ (a terrorist) to ‘‘feels like’’ (a terrorist) (2007, 187). It is precisely this affective move that perhaps best explains the complex operations at work in the production of racial phantasmata: even before one has caught site of the threatening figure of the radicalized other, one senses or ‘‘feels’’ that spectral presence that radiates precognitive, tacit, ‘‘intuitive’’ danger and threats of violence:

So the lungs spasm even before the senses cognate the presence of a shadow in a ‘‘dark street in the dangerous part of town.’’ The ‘‘dangerous part of town’’ and the shadow [/ phantasm] are then identifiable objects for which epistemic force is confirmed only after, or, more accurately, as affective response has taken place. (Puar 2007, 189)

In this way, the visual identification of racial phantasmata must be construed in terms of ‘‘identity-as-retrospective-ordering’’ (Puar 2007, 215). This retrospective ordering of identity is what takes place as/after the affective precomprehension or precognition of the radicalized other has been set in motion, and it is perhaps here that, in the context of this pre-rational embodied locus of affect, one can begin to source the power exerted by racial phantasmata.

‘‘Boys will be boys’’: whitewashing histories of racial violence

In the course of this article, I have been concerned with mapping the racializing dynamics of contemporary forms of culturalist and differentialist racism in the context of post-9/11 Islam phobia and Arab phobia. My focus has been on the ways in which items of clothing the niqab or the balaclava have been soma technically charged as symbols of threat and terror. As such, within the context of the white supremacist narratives I have been unfolding; these embodied metonyms of infralegal activities have been mobilized in order to foment cultural panics. I drew attention, in passing, to the unspoken asymmetries of power that inscribe and constitute Western liberalism. Western liberalism’s traditional non discriminating core is founded on the effacement of histories of radicalized violence, including genocide, slavery and lynchings. The Native American cultural theorist Andrea Smith succinctly articulates the whitewashing of this foundational violence:

White supremacy, colonialism, and economic exploitation are inextricably linked to US democratic ideals rather than aberrations from it. The ‘‘freedom’’ guaranteed to some individuals in society has always been premised upon the radical unfreedom of others. Very specifically, the US could not exist without the genocide of indigenous peoples. (Smith 2005, 184)

In moving toward the conclusion of this article, I want to bring into focus the violent radicalized double standards that continue to inscribe Western liberalism by drawing attention to one final example of radicalized soma technologies. A recently released video posted on YouTube showed the activities of a group of Australian soldiers stationed in Darwin, capital city of the Northern Territory. One of the soldiers ‘‘is shown in the full garb, complete with pointed hood, of the Klan, the fanatical group that tortured and murdered black people in the US’’ (Skehan 2007, 3) (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Australian soldier wearing a Ku Klux Klan tunic and hood.

Australia’s former Prime Minister, John Howard, when asked to respond to the activities of the soldiers, replied that ‘‘boys will be boys’’: ‘‘I have some understanding of the disposition of people in these situations to let off a bit of steam . . . People get into a lather of sweat and so on . . . Let’s be sensible about this’’ (Skehan 2007, 3). The former Defense Minister, Brendan Nelson, remarked: ‘‘it is letting off a bit of steam and a bit of Larrikin irreverence’’ (Skehan 2007, 3). Reproduced in the remarks of these two figures of white governmental authority is a disavowal of the fact that the soma technology of the Ku Klux Klan’s white tunic and pointed hood signifies, for people of color, violence, race hate and terror. The racial violence embodied by this garment is, in their dismissive remarks, at once vitiated and naturalized by being inserted within phallocentric hetero-normative white-supremacist narratives of ‘‘boys being boys’’. The invocation of the ‘‘irreverent’’ figure of the Larrikin, an exclusively white heteromale Anglo-Australian national icon, functions further to neutralize the history of radicalized violence represented by this Ku Klux Klan garment. Furthermore, the white supremacist practices performed by members of the Australian army in the Northern Territory must be situated in the context of the Australian government’s recent deployment of the military in order to deal with alleged cases of child abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities (see Marr 2007, 33). This extraordinary move, made without any consultation on the part of Indigenous communities, and in direct violation of the recommendations made by the recent Indigenous report All children are sacred on how best to address child abuse, has generated panic amongst the Indigenous communities because of the long history of colonial violence perpetrated by both military and paramilitary forces, including massacres and the forced removals of Aboriginal children from their parents during the years of colonial assimilation.

Not far from where white Australian soldiers performed their mock Ku Klux Klan ‘‘antics’’ is Coniston, the site of a massacre of Warlpiri people by white police. This massacre, which occurred in 1928, is still within the living memory of some of the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal people:

Some 60 to 70 Warlpiri people were killed over several weeks by a police party. Murray, the officer in charge, openly admitted to a policy of shoot to kill. According to a missionary who spoke to survivors of the killings, ‘‘the natives tell me they simply shot them like dogs and that they got the little children and hit them on the back of the neck and killed them’’ . . . An inquiry headed by a police inspector, at which Aboriginal people were refused legal representation, was established into the killings. The inquiry cleared those who were involved. (Cunneen 2001, 55)

Viewed in this colonial context, the Ku Klux Klan garb must be seen as historically coextensive with both Australian military and police uniforms. As a soma technology invested with a history of white violence and terror, this history is what must be disavowed, neutralized and reduced to mere ‘‘boys’ games’’. In an exemplary manner, this move is what reproduces the complex logic of disavowal and displacement that so characterizes white relations of power: whiteness denigrates its own apparatuses of violence and terror, resignifying its own racially marked soma technologies of violence as neutral and benign, whilst simultaneously inscribing a range of other racially charged soma technologies in terms of so many embodied metonymic displacements: fear, terror and violence  they only ever arrive in the garb of the niqab, the balaclava and that swarthy figure ‘‘of Middle Eastern appearance’’. Situated within this white logic of structural effacement and metonymic displacement, these racially charged phantasmata are mobilized as so many infralegal threats that are ready to destroy the ‘‘implicit social contract’’ a contract in which what must remain ‘‘implicit’’ is the disavowed white violence that at once founds and constitutes its liberal core.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Michael Mucci for his generosity in allowing reproduction of the image of women in niqabs on a Petri dish. The author is also grateful to Reza Aramesh for his generous permission to reproduce his artwork. The author’s readings of Reza Aramesh’s images do not necessarily reflect the views of the artist. The YouTube image is reproduced with permission of Australian Associated Press.

Note

1. I am grateful to Susan Stryker for coining the term ‘‘somatechnics’’. For a detailed definition of this term, see the Somatechnics Research Centre website (http://www.somatechnics. org).

Note on contributor

Joseph Pugliese is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. His research areas include race and ethnicity, cultural theory, migration and diaspora, visual culture, embodiment and technology, terrorism and racial profiling, and cultural studies of law.

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Media Exposure and Marketing

Society has selective prefernces of the things that it wants to see and they way that it wants those things to be seen, hence the incorpoartions of stereotypes and proaganda into popular media. The focus of attention on only the content that the government, or media exectuives want people to see has lead to brand of advertising that I will refer to as  “based marketing.” Essentially it is just as the title states; a form of marketing based upon a specific subject. Common subjects for adevertising include gender, age, race, martial status, sexual orientation and etc. Some advertising firms appoint board members or create offices explicity for the purposes of based marketing and it hardly needs to be noted that race is one of the biggest based marketing components. Memebers of these boards are hired to study the consumeristic trendss of various race/ethnic groups and take into account age, sex, and income. This is done so that businesses and advertising firms can gear certain products to a particular market, under the hypohtesis that those prducts will yield a sufficient profit.

    

Others however believe that racial based marketing goes much deeper than that. Some people believe tha advertisements geared towards a particular race reflect more the general stereotypes or stereotyical roles, because of an underlying desire for society to be more like that. For people of a certain group look, speak, and act in a certain manner. Another belief is that the products are just reflections of earlier times and remind the creators of their experiences during that time. A more realistic explanation of the general roles seen in racial based advertisements may be that the individuals that the market researchers studied (or surveyed) were affected more by those type of advertisements and others may not be, thus they based all their informtion uopon that one catalyst.

Dynamic Model of Racial Comepetiton, Racial Inequality, and Interracial Violence

Patricia L. McCall, North Carolina State University

Karen F. Parker, University of Florida

Race relations and stratification literatures offer explicit expectations concerning

Interracial conflict. Causal arguments derived from these perspectives are examined in this study to explore their ability to explain interracial violence above and beyond criminological perspectives of economic deprivation and racial inequality. The vast majority of previous aggregate-level studies on violence are cross-sectional, ignoring the importance of a dynamic model that incorporates the influence of changing structural conditions in urban areas on interracial violence. We explore theories that incorporate dynamic explanations for the influence of structural factors related to crime as well as racial conflict and employ a methodological approach that models the change in structural conditions for rare events such as interracial homicide. We find that changes between 1980 and 1990 in urban Black and Hispanic population composition, racial competition and racial inequality differentially explain the variation in White and Black interracial homicide offending.

Introduction

Since researchers began disaggregating homicides in order to examine race specific offending, unique contributions have been made to understanding the influence of social and economic forces on homicide behavior of subgroups in the population (Harer and Steffensmeier 1992; Krivo and Peterson 2000; Messner and Golden 1992; Parker and McCall 1997, 1999; Peterson and Krivo 1993; Shihadeh and Flynn 1996; Shihadeh and Maume 1997; Williams and Flewelling 1988). The field also has benefitted in recent decades from the wedding of race relations and stratification literature with criminological theories in pursuing explanations for the widely disparate violent offending rates between Whites and Blacks (Krivo and Peterson 2000; Messner and Golden 1992; Messner and South 1986; Parker and McCall 1997; Peterson and Krivo 1993; Sampson 1987). Others have linked racial conflict to interracial homicide (Jacobs and Wood 1999; Parker and McCall 1999) and provide evidence that local opportunity structure, racial inequality, and political competition differentially influence White on- Black versus Black-on-White homicide offending.

Central to these race relations and stratification literatures is the notion that changes in minority population composition (Blalock 1967) and economic forces (Massey and Eggers 1990; Wilson 1987, 1991) are catalysts for interracial conflict and concentrated disadvantage. An examination of race relations theories, such as Blalock’s minority-threat thesis, requires a dynamic model or analysis over time. Yet most aggregate-level studies that incorporate this literature into studies of race-specific violence are cross-sectional (Krivo and Peterson 2000; Parker and McCall 1999; Peterson and Krivo 1993). Our current study provides an examination of the influence that change in racial competition and racial inequality has on interracial violence. We propose that incorporating change into the research model is needed in exploring the dynamics that are central to some of these theories and in evaluating their application to the study of interracial violence. Thus, the present study examines the dynamic nature of the relationships between racial competition, racial inequality and interracial homicide between 1980 and 1990 in large U.S. cities using Poisson regression estimation techniques. These theories should find support during these periods which witnessed change in the social and economic forces underlying these causal arguments. We begin by briefly outlining the key concepts from the race-relations and stratification literatures that inform our study of interracial violence.

Threat and Conflict between Racial Groups

Traditionally economic deprivation and racial inequality arguments have been used to explain race-specific violence (Harer and Steffensmeier 1992; Messner and Golden 1992; Messner and South 1992; Parker and McCall 1997).  More recently race relations arguments have been introduced along with criminological perspectives in addressing race-specific criminal offending (Jacobs and Wood 1999, Parker and McCall 1999). Our research builds on the efforts of others by emphasizing the importance of shifts or change in economic resources and urban conditions identified in these literatures.

Blalock’s (1967) theory of minority-group relations—also referred to as his “minority threat” thesis—claims that as the relative size of the minority group increases, members of the majority group perceive a growing threat to their positions and will take steps to reduce the competition. Blalock argues that the competition between interracial groups assumes two forms—competition over economic resources, and power threats. Most extant research examining Blalock’s thesis relies on the concentration of Blacks in the population to measure minority threat.

Racial Composition

Blalock (1967) postulates that racial threat is positively related to the amount of minority concentration in a population with a decreasing slope. That is, as the concentration of minorities increases in a location, so too will the threat Blacks pose to Whites; and as this concentration of Blacks reaches some threshold, the threat of competition will diminish. Importantly, Blalock’s theory emphasizes the dynamic forces associated with an increase or change in the minority group (Black) population.

Economic and Labor Force Competition

Racial competition perspectives suggest that conflicts between racial groups are a result of minorities being positioned disproportionately among the lower classes and typically relegated to unskilled or semiskilled occupations. As Whites attempt to maintain their economic positions in the labor market, minorities are disproportionately found among lower paid positions with little hope for advancement (Bonacich 1976). Racial conflict ensues because Blacks pose an economic threat to low-skilled White workers as they compete for lower-level jobs (Blalock 1967; Blauner 1982; Lieberson 1980). Attempts to exclude Blacks from participating in the labor market and competing against Whites for jobs can take the form of violence by Whites against Blacks (Huff-Corzine, Corzine, and Moore 1991; Olzak 1990; Parker and McCall 1999; Tolnay, Beck, and Massey 1992). Therefore, Whites’ hostilities toward Blacks are a function of the (real or perceived) threat of competition Blacks pose as their numbers increase. Moreover, these theories describe a dynamic process, in that the change in economic opportunities is the key to linking racial competition to White interracial violence.

Labor force competition is posited to be related to Black interracial violence because labor force competition between Whites and Blacks is likely to be manifested in racial inequality—the aggravations and hostilities engendered by their history of subordination and discrimination by Whites (Bobo and Gilliam 1990; Bobo and Hutchings 1996). Because minorities are disproportionately represented among the lower class and the unemployed, discrimination experienced within these economic spheres engenders strain, frustration, and animosity. Relatively few studies have incorporated these arguments to explain interracial homicide (for exceptions, see Jacobs and Wood 1999; Messner and Golden 1992; Parker and McCall 1997, 1999).

Political Competition

In early U.S. history, Blacks had no power or status in the political arena. More recently, Blacks’ relative powerlessness has improved as growing numbers of Blacks win elections for municipal and national political offices. As Jacobs and Wood (1999) argue, these political victories for Blacks alter racial tensions and decrease interracial violence. Not only does Black political presence diminish racial strife and decrease incidents of Black racial violence against Whites, Blacks’ growing political strength may be perceived by Whites as another form of threat that increases resentment on the part of Whites, and, thereby, increases the chances for White-on-Black interracial violence (Jacobs and Wood 1999). Thus, it can be argued that political competition will threaten Whites’ dominant position and engender hostility among Whites as Blacks improve their economic and political status. Because Whites have long dominated the political domain, changes in political competition are not likely to influence Black-on- White violence.

Hypotheses

While the structural conditions reviewed above have been incorporated in previous studies of interracial homicide, by and large, the change in these structural conditions has not. Based on the theoretical arguments described above, we test the following relationships. First, according to Blalock, an increase in the percentage of the Black population elevates rates of White violence. This measure has been used widely in the race relations literature for the purpose of testing the power threat thesis (Olzak, Shanahan, and McEneaney 1996; Tolnay and Beck 1992; Tolnay, Beck, and Massey 1989). Consistent with this literature, we pose that growing Black population composition (or an increase in the Black population from 1980 to 1990) will increase the likelihood of White interracial homicide.

Second, racial competition theorists posit that as Whites lose out to, or perceive themselves as threatened by, Blacks in the labor force, Whites will become (more) hostile toward Blacks, thereby increasing the likelihood for conflict between members of these two groups. Therefore, with regard to our examination of the changing forces occurring between 1980 and 1990, we hypothesize that cities with increasing labor force competition (declining labor market security for Whites) will experience increasing White interracial homicides.

Labor force competition faced by Blacks and the injustice Blacks endure through discriminatory hiring practices breeds resentment and animosity toward Whites. While researchers suggest improved conditions for Blacks may decrease Black interracial competition and interracial conflict (Jacobs and Wood 1999), we propose that as competition between these two groups increases between 1980 and 1990, Black interracial homicide should increase. In summary, the parameter coefficients for the variables measuring this concept are posited to be negative in the White and positive in the Black interracial homicide models. The data and strategy we employ to analyze these proposed relationships are described in the following sections.

 

Data and Methods

U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 and over in 1980 constitute our sample of cases included in the analyses. The selection of cities during this time period allows for greater comparability with existing research. Wilson (1987, 1991) as well as Massey and Eggers (1990) focus on the changing structure of central cities in recent decades and demonstrate how poor and minority populations have been stranded in urban areas where local opportunities for employment have diminished along with deindustrialization—the exodus of major industries into suburban and rural areas. The resulting social isolation and poverty concentration have dealt a harsh hand—one that is accompanied with dwindling hope and even fewer opportunities for escape from poverty. Inclusion of this time period allows us to estimate the impact of various structural indicators on interracial homicide events during a decade of significant change (Shihadeh and Ousey 1996, 1998). Because our conceptual model emphasizes change between 1980 and 1990, measures for key concepts were collected for the two decennial points. The full data set based on the 1980 largest cities is restricted to 168 cases. To minimize the impact of year-to-year fluctuations for the rare events of interracial homicide, interracial offending counts are based on a five-year average of homicide data for the years, 1978 to 1982 and 1987 to 1991—years circa 1980 and 1990 for which data were available at the time of data collection. Missing data on some variables further reduced our sample to 146 cases for the two time points.1

The Comparative Homicide Files (CHF), which are derived from the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports, provide data for our measure of interracial homicide.2 These data are widely employed in race-specific analyses of homicide (Allen and Buckner 1997; Harer and Steffensmeier 1992; Jacobs and Wood 1999; Krivo and Peterson 1996, 2000; Messner and Golden 1992; Ousey 1999; Parker and McCall 1997, 1999; Peterson and Krivo 1993; Sampson 1987; Shihadeh and Flynn 1996; Shihadeh and Maume 1997; Shihadeh and Steffensmeier 1994; Williams and Flewelling 1988). U.S. Bureau of the Census population statistics are sources for our social and economic indicators and represent those widely employed in studies of homicide offending.

Dependent Variables

This study focuses on 1980 and 1990 murders and no negligent manslaughters with a single offender and single victim, which is consistent with previous research investigating race-specific offending (Krivo and Peterson, 2000; Messner and Golden 1992; Parker and McCall 1997, 1999; Williams and Flewelling 1988). Although instances of multiple-offender homicides are omitted from this analysis, this method avoids ambiguous classifications of incidents with multiple victims and offenders of different racial groups. Until further information is available on the nature of those homicides omitted by this data, it is difficult to assess the implications of these omissions on the findings of the present study.3 The interracial (White-on-Black and Black-on-White) homicide counts for each race-specific offending group are computed as the average number of homicides involving an offender and victim of opposite races around the two decennial time points, 1980 and 1990. For example, the White interracial homicide count is the total number of homicides involving a White offender with a Black victim. Rather than interracial homicide rates, we use interracial homicide counts which are more appropriate for Poisson-based regression models, which are preferable in analyzing data with the distributional properties of such rare events (Osgood 2000).

Explanatory and Control Variables

The concepts comprising our causal models include racial composition, racial competition (political, labor market, and economic), racial inequality, economic disadvantage, and racial segregation. The reader should bear in mind the theories driving this analysis imply that changes in the relative well-being of Whites vis-à-vis Blacks are the catalyst for conflict between members of these two groups. Therefore, it is the contextual dynamics of urban centers about which we are concerned and our discussion of the relationships of these social and economic factors on interracial homicide is an examination of how the changes in U.S. cities during this period influenced interracial homicide offending.

We begin by operationalizing racial composition which is measured by calculating the percent of the total urban population that is Black. This measure of Black population composition is posited to be positively related to White interracial homicide.

There are separate concepts derived from competition theory—in particular, those pertaining to racial competition. Political competition is measured as whether or not the city has a Black mayor (Bobo and Gilliam 1990; Bobo and Hutchings 1996; Jacobs and Wood 1999). The rationale for employing this measure is that Whites are likely to feel that their political power is diminished and that their majority position is threatened when a Black mayor is elected (Bobo and Gilliam 1990; Bobo and Hutchings 1996).

We operationalize labor force competition as the ratio of the percentage of Blacks not employed in the labor force to the percentage of Whites not employed in the labor force. This ratio reflects the need or competition for jobs by race specific populations. Thus, lower values of this measure capture greater labor force competition faced by Whites relative to Blacks while higher values represent greater labor force competition for Blacks. Following Krivo, Peterson, Rizzo, and Reynolds (1998) and Parker and McCall (1999), the percent of persons not employed is used because it includes those persons who are not actively seeking employment relative to the official definition of unemployment which excludes these individuals. The percent not employed for each racial group is computed by dividing the number of employed by the number of persons 16 years of age and over, multiplying by 100, and then subtracting the result from 100.

Economic competition is operationalized as the ratio of White to Black median family income—one that has been traditionally used to measure the economic aspect of racial inequality. Larger values of the ratio represent a better economic situation for Whites relative to Blacks.

Previous research exploring race-specific homicide offending and racial inequality have found economic disadvantage (Krivo and Peterson 1996, 2000) and racial segregation (Massey and Eggers 1990; Messner and Golden 1992) to be contributing factors. These concepts are employed as explanatory variables and are measured, respectively, as the percentage of the population living below the poverty level for each race-specific population and the index of dissimilarity which is based on the racial composition of urban census tracts and depends on the relative size of the two groups.4

Population size and Hispanic population composition also are employed as control measures in this study. Population size is measured by the race-specific resident population residing in these central cities and is included as an exposure measure (elaborated below). Another aspect of population composition, the percentage of the population which is Hispanic, is introduced as a control for police error when identifying and recording victims and offenders as Whites or Blacks rather than correctly identifying them as Hispanics in police reports (Parker and McCall 1999). Regional differences are captured with three dummy measures for the South, West, and Midwest regions—the Northeast region omitted as the reference category.

Finally, because the model investigates the influence of changing social and economic conditions on interracial homicide offending, each of these measures (except the regional indicators) also are entered as the change between 1980 (t – 1) and 1990 (t)—with the change (delta) calculated as: D = (t – (t -1)).

 

Analytic Procedures

Poisson regression is employed because the dependent variables are based on discrete counts of rare events (i.e., the number of interracial homicides), have skewed distributions and include cases (cities) with zero counts. Poisson gives unbiased, consistent, and efficient estimates for these types of dependent variables and is preferred over ordinary least squares (OLS) regression when one is not able to meet the assumptions for OLS—such as, the assumptions of homogeneity of error variance and normal error distributions (see Osgood 2000:22–3).5 The statistical software we employ provides the capacity to correct for the city’s race-specific population (of offenders) as an exposure variable by constraining its coefficient to equal one (STATA, version 7). This method converts the counts of interracial homicide into the equivalent of a rate for each city (Maddala 1983; Osgood 2000).

There is no clear consensus regarding the best way to model change in sociological research (Firebaugh and Beck 1994; Hausman, Hall, and Griliches 1984; Kessler and Greenberg 1981). To test the element of change underlying the theoretical approaches outlined above, we follow the model specification employed by Greenberg and West (2001:635) which includes difference measures for the independent variables.6 The model specification takes the following form: yt = a + b1yt-1 + b2xt-1 + b3(xt – xt-1) + . . . + et, where t represents 1990 and t –1 represents 1980, xt–1 represents the 1980 independent variables, and xt – xt–1 represents the change between 1980 and 1990 for the independent variables.

Table 1 provides descriptive information for our city-level variables measured in 1980 and 1990. Changes between 1980 and 1990 are presented in the third column which reveals increasing mean numbers of Black and White interracial homicides committed during this period for these U.S. cities and increasing (positive) means for all explanatory measures except for racial segregation—likely declining as a result of gentrification of segments of these urban centers.

The bi-variate correlations reveal evidence of collinearity or problems associated with the partialing fallacy. Techniques for identifying the extent of this problem are undertaken in estimating the regression models to determine whether these high correlations have a substantive influence on the findings.7 The overall support for the theories examined in this analysis are largely unchanged when estimating alternate models.8 Bi-variate scatter plots revealed no curvilinear relationships between the dependent and independent variables; therefore, there is no need for variable transformations.

Findings

Table 2 presents the parameter coefficients estimated from the Poisson regression analyses. Models 1 and 3 represent the results for Black and White interracial homicide offending, respectively, that omit the change measures and are provided only as a baseline for comparison with the Models of interest, 2 and 4, that include the change measures indicated with “D” (symbolizing “delta”) preceding the variable name that represents the change between 1980 and 1990.

We focus our review of the results on the change measures in Models 2 and 4 that are statistically significant. The implications of these results will be elaborated in the discussion section.

The primary support for the influence of change on interracial violence is found for Blalock’s minority threat thesis—the coefficient for the change in percent Black population is positive and statistically significant in the White interracial homicide model. In addition, one of the three measures for racial competition, labor force competition, is statistically significant in the White interracial model although the relationship is positive and, therefore, not consistent

 with theoretical prediction. Competition theory states that increasing racial competition would be associated with interracial conflict. The labor force competition measure (ratio of not-employed Blacks to not-employed Whites) indicates that White-on-Black homicides were higher in 1990 in cities where Blacks faired worse relative to Whites in the labor force between 1980 and 1990. This finding is contrary to the theoretical prediction because Black’s declining labor force participation relative to Whites’ would not pose any threat of job security for Whites. On the other hand, in the Black interracial homicide model, the coefficient for this labor force competition variable is statistically significant and positively related to Black-on-White homicides. This supports the hypothesis that increasing competition between the races in the labor force between 1980 and 1990 and resulting frustrations engendered among Blacks were associated with higher Black-on-White homicides with our sample of cities for 1990.1

Table 1

Means, Standard Deviations (in parentheses), and Percent Change for

Characteristics of Cities in 1980 and 1990

1980 1990 Percent change (%)

Black interracial 6.63 6.71 1.21

homicide (counts) (18.00) (20.91)

White interracial 2.98 3.66 22.82

homicide (counts) (9.30) (15.69)

Percent Black population 20.26 22.26 9.87

(16.85) (18.01)

Proportion of cities .07 .14 100.00

with Black mayor (.25) (.34)

Ratio of not employed 1.11 1.16 4.50

Blacks to Whites (.14) (.18)

Ratio of median family 1.58 1.73 9.49

Income of Whites to Blacks (.26) (.37)

Percent Blacks in poverty 26.68 28.12 5.40

(6.94) (8.18)

Percent Whites in poverty 10.16 10.83 6.59

(3.35) (3.86)

Racial segregation 71.89 53.77 −25.20

(10.95) (16.91)

Population size 363.95 386.59 6.22

(in thousandths) (690.18) (719.23)

Percent Hispanic population 8.41 11.21 33.29

(10.93) (13.44)

South .34

(.47)

West .32

(.47)

Northeast .16

(.36)

Midwest .19

(.40)

Table 2

Poisson Regression Coefficients (and Z-Scores) for Change in 1990 Black and White Interracial Homicides, N 146

Black Interracial White Interracial

(1) (2) (3) (4)

Interracial homicides 1980 0.003** 0.004** 0.012** 0.012**

(3.16) (2.58) (5.73) (4.06)

Percent Black population −.008* −.0060.037** 0.034**

(Racial composition) (−2.23) (−1.28) (6.99) (5.43)

Black mayor 0.125 0.061 0.212 −.021

(Political competition) (1.00) (0.43) (1.13) (−.10)

Ratio of not employed B/W −.707 .004 −.618 0.536

(Labor force competition) (−1.22) (0.01) (−.87) (0.57)

Ratio of income of W/B .995** 0.924** −.030 −.144

(Racial income inequality) (3.68) (2.74) (−.07) (−.29)

Race-specific poverty −.030** −.022−.029 −.001

(Poverty concentration) (−3.15) (−1.76) (−1.14) (−.05)

Racial residential segregation −.009* −.015* 0.0100.007

(Interracial contact) (−1.76) (−2.24) (1.51) (0.76)

Percent Hispanic population 0.022** 0.018** 0.023** 0.011

(4.83) (2.71) (3.41) (1.11)

A DYNAMIC MODEL OF RACIAL COMPETITION 283

South −.021 −.102 −.437* −.087

(−0.14) (−.53) (−2.15) (−.34)

West 0.436** 0.335* −.058 0.078

(2.89) (2.08) (−.28) (0.34)

Midwest .220 .085 0.521* −.432

(1.41) (0.44) (−2.28) (−1.55)

D-Percent Black population — 0.022 — 0.100**

(1.01) (3.17)

D-Black mayor — 0.100 — −.007

(0.61) (−.03)

D-Ratio of not employed — 1.006* — 1.846**

Blacks to Whites (1.66) (2.42)

D-Ratio of income of — −.020 — −.230

Whites to Blacks (−.07) (−.63)

D-Race-specific poverty — 0.007 — −.035

(0.46) (−1.03)

D-Racial residential segregation — −.008 — 0.013

(−.91) (1.19)

D-Percent Hispanic population — 0.033* — 0.088**

(2.02) (3.74)

Constant −9.18** −9.90** −12.15** −13.58**

Log-likelihood −263.99** −258.90** −209.59** −196.35**

Pseudo R-square .354 .367 .466 .500

Notes: **p .01, *p .05, p .10 (one-tailed). “D” change measure (1980–1990).

Turning to our control measure for Hispanic population composition, change in the percent Hispanic population is statistically significant and positive in both of the interracial homicide models. This implies that cities with growing proportions of Hispanics in the population between 1980 and 1990 had larger numbers of interracial homicides involving Black as well as White offenders in 1990. Recall that this control measure is included primarily to account for police misrecording the race of the offender in police reports. Among the regional effects, the West has a significant, positive influence only in the Black interracial homicide model—that is, cities in the west have higher numbers of Black interracial homicides than cities in the Northeastern part of the United States (the reference category for region). We now elaborate these findings in relation to their theoretical underpinnings.

Discussion and Conclusions

The purpose of this research is to model and test the dynamic nature of the arguments underlying major race relations theories to determine the extent to which these theories account for interracial violent behavior. Based on race relations literature, we hypothesized that mounting racial economic, labor force, and political competition would spur White interracial homicide offending whereas Black interracial homicide would be associated with increasing labor force competition

and racial inequality. By and large, our findings show mixed support for the importance of change implicit in these competition arguments in the White interracial homicide model. We begin our discussion of our findings with the classic indicator of racial competition—growing Black population.

We find support for Blalock’s minority threat thesis that members of the majority group perceive a growing minority population as a threat to their dominant social position. Consistent with Jacobs and Wood’s (1999) cross-sectional analysis of interracial homicide and with many extant race relations analyses that employ percentage Black population as a measure of minority threat (Olzak and Shanahan 1996; Olzak, Shanahan and McEneaney 1996; Tolnay and Beck 1992; Tolnay, Beck, and Massey 1989), our analysis provides evidence that the increasing Black population between 1980 and 1990 is related to White interracial homicide. Blau’s (1977) macro structural perspective provides another explanation for these findings. As Blau argues, in cities where there are higher proportions of the urban population comprised of Blacks, there will be an increase in the likelihood of interracial interaction and, in turn, a greater likelihood of interracial violence. As Blau noted in his macro structural theory, the opportunity for interracial contact is required for meaningful interracial association. Therefore, the population composition of a community sets the stage for the likelihood of these contacts. More importantly, the nature, as well as the extent of interracial contact, are sculpted by the social and economic conditions in which interracial contact occurs (Messner and Golden 1992; Messner and South 1992; Sampson 1987; South and Messner 1986). Therefore, the statistical significance of the percent Black population may be explained by Blalock’s minority threat thesis, Blau’s macro structural (opportunity) perspective, or both.

Competition theorists argue that it is the threat of competition for jobs, power, and positions (whether such threats are real or imagined), whereby Blacks pose a political or economic threat to Whites that leads to an inherent conflict between them (Blauner 1982; Lieberson 1980). Change in labor force competition (the ratio of the percent not-employed Blacks to not-employed Whites) affects White interracial homicide, but the effect has a positive coefficient which is contrary to the hypothesis derived from racial competition theory. Although racial competition theory is not supported with our indicators of economic, political competition, or labor force competition as predicted in the White interracial homicide model, one could argue that growing proportions of minorities in the population would pose a sense of threat to the majority population regardless of whether there was an actual economic or political threat as reflected in the empirical indicators employed in this study. A study of labor market influences during a period of more severe economic downturn and job losses such as that between 1970 and 1980 may reveal evidence of such effects, but supplemental homicide data were not available until the mid-1970s.

Whereas the influence of changes in labor force competition is opposite to theoretical prediction in the White interracial homicide model, this competition measure has a positive, statistically significant influence on Black interracial homicide and provides support for this argument. These results indicate that cities with diminishing labor force opportunities for Blacks relative to Whites’ opportunities between 1980 and 1990, experienced higher numbers of Black interracial homicides in 1990. The influence of this aspect of racial competition is an indicator of structural discrimination, and evidence that Whites’ labor force gains at the expense of Blacks’ continue to disrupt to race relations. As noted earlier, when this model was estimated using a three-year average for Black-on- White homicides for the period circa 1990 (1989–1991 three-year average versus 1987–1991 five-year average), these findings were not substantiated. Therefore, these findings are not robust across the two models.

The other statistically significant coefficient among the change measures in the White interracial and Black interracial homicide models is that for the percent of Hispanics in the population. One could argue that the significant influence of the growing Hispanic population may represent a logical extension of Blalock’s threat thesis. Growing Hispanic populations could pose the same type of threats to Whites and Blacks as Hispanics move into an area and compete with them in the labor force and in the political arena. Because the Hispanic population composition was not introduced as an indicator for our theoretical arguments and hypotheses, we will leave this finding to simply reflect that for which it was introduced—a correction for police recording practices. Other researchers interested in the study of minority population composition and the influence of minority population dynamics on interracial interaction may want to consider this potential source of interracial conflict in future research.

In conclusion, Blalock’s minority threat thesis is supported in the White on- Black homicide model and support emerges for the importance of labor force competition in the Black-on-White homicide model. We find evidence that racial competition theory vis-à-vis a growing Black population best explains higher numbers of White interracial homicide offending in large U.S. cities in 1990, whereas changes in labor market opportunities account for higher Black on- White homicides in 1990.

As we take stock of our findings and examine the broader implications of these results, we warn the reader against committing the ecological fallacy. These findings do not necessarily demonstrate that certain social and economic factors or changes in these factors are forces that influence a member of one racial group to commit homicide against persons of other races. We argue, though, that certain social and economic forces create contexts which engender stress, frustration, and hostility among some societal members more so than others. In turn, these interracial hostilities have the potential to result in interpersonal conflict that may have a lethal outcome. The race of the homicide “victim” may not necessarily represent the source of the frustration or hostility, and it is not possible to distinguish the aggressor from the assaulted in these interracial homicide statistics. The fact that the instigator of the conflict may become the “victim” of homicide may account for the anomalous support for the positive effect of the change in labor force competition in the White interracial homicide model. Nevertheless, these analyses shed light on and further refine the theoretical arguments which address race relations in the United States.

The results of these analyses of change do not diminish the importance of the enduring influence of power differentials between Whites and Blacks on interracial conflict. Prior research has demonstrated how economic and political rivalries are related to interracial conflict (Myers 1990; Olzak 1990; Tolnay, Beck, and Massey 1989) and interracial homicide (Jacobs and Wood 1999). Nevertheless, the extent to which change in various aspects of racial competition over time is related to interracial violence is not well established. Our study of the dynamics between 1980 and 1990 provide additional support for this association. Future research that examines periods with more dramatic rates of economic downturn and political power shifts may provide evidence substantiating the dynamic nature of these associations. Our research demonstrates the importance of measuring change and examining the influence that change in population composition and racial competition has on interracial conflict. These findings emphasize how social and economic dynamics contribute to our understanding of interracial violence over and above extant efforts that examine relationships between racial threat, competition, and interracial violence in the cross-sectional literature. Thus, while theoretical arguments have been developed in the past 25 years to account for racial disparities by investigating racially disaggregated homicide events, there is still much work to be done in this area.

 

ENDNOTES

*Authors’ names are listed alphabetically. Direct correspondence to Patricia L. McCall, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107. Telephone: 919-515-9010 or 919-5150-2610. Email: patty_mccall@ncsu.edu.

The authors thank John MacDonald, David Jacobs, Rodney Engen, William R. Smith, David Greenberg, and anonymous reviewers for their assistance and comments.

1. Our use of different years circa the decennial time point (that is, 1978–1982 versus 1987–1991) simply had to do with the years for which data were available when we initially constructed our data set. At that time, the data for 1992 were not available and because we were collecting data for estimates of the decennial time point (using five rather than three years to take into account the rare nature of interracial homicides). We contend that the choice of years provides only an approximation for these homicide events. The models were estimated using more standardized four-year average homicide measures (1978–1981 and 1988–1991) and we found that there was one substantive difference in the findings regarding the influence of change on interracial homicide: change in labor force competition measure in the Black interracial homicide model was no longer statistically significant.

In addition, the fact that interracial homicide is a rare event raises the question of the reliability of aggregate-level estimates—especially in cities with small populations of Blacks. Other studies of race-specific offending have restricted the cases included in analyses to those with at least five percent of Blacks in the city (Krivo and Peterson, 2000; Messner and Golden 1992; Parker and McCall 1997, 1999; Peterson and Krivo 1993; Sampson 1987). Because we employ one of the Poisson families of regression techniques (which were developed for estimating rare events) and because our focus is on the dynamics related to the impact of varying sizes of minority populations, we do not restrict our sample to those with a minimum percentage of Blacks. In addition to missing data, the sample was reduced also because homicide data are not available for cities in Florida circa 1990. Although the data circa 1990 do not represent the standard five years—from 1988 through 1992—these are the years for which data were available at the time of our data collection. Nevertheless, these five-year averages should provide sufficient estimates for this decennial time period.

2. The Comparative Homicide File (CHF) was created by Williams and Flewelling who compiled this information from the Homicide Supplemental Reports. We acknowledge alternative procedures are also available to deal with missing data (see Messner, Deane, and Beaulieu 2002). However, our read of that literature which analyzes and compares alternative methods (i.e., Messner et al. 2002; Pampel and Williams 2000) leads us to the conclusion that there is no evidence supporting one method over the other. See also Messner and Golden (1992) and Williams and Flewelling (1988) for further detailed descriptions of these data.

3. Another important data issue in this study is the problem of missing data on offenders’ race. Approximately one-fourth of the recorded homicides in the CHF report the race of the offender as unknown. Furthermore, the potential for measurement bias is created as the racial patterning of homicide events in which information is missing may differ from the patterning of nonmissing events (Messner and South 1992). The imputation algorithm developed by Williams and Flewelling (1988) was employed to address this problem. This algorithm is used to “extrapolate the characteristics of the known cases to those with missing information. Essentially the procedure involves the estimation of the race of the offender (where unknown) on the basis of the type of incident under investigation and the observed racial patterning of that type of incident when the offender’s race is known for a given city” (1988: 426).

4. The index of dissimilarity is one of many measures of segregation being proposed for use in criminological research (see Shihadeh and Flynn 1996; Shihadeh and Maume 1997). We employ the index of dissimilarity to capture the distribution of population subgroups across census tracts and the relative size of the two groups (Massey and Denton 1988)—the relative size being one of the key factors underlying competition theses.

5. The basic Poisson regression equation is comparable to the practice of using the logarithmic transformation of the aggregate crime rate dependent variable in Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression which is used in most extant homicide research. Employing Poisson regression avoids many estimation problems (e.g., heterogeneity) associated with OLS analyses of crime rates. Chisquare goodness of fit test statistics indicate Poisson rather than negative binomial is the appropriate estimation technique for these models (STATA, version 7). See Osgood (2000:24) for an excellent discussion of related methodological issues.

6. We depart from Greenberg and West’s model specification by regressing the interracial homicides in 1990 rather than the difference between the numbers of homicides in 1990 and 1980 that was central to Greenberg and West’s hypotheses, on the explanatory variables.

7. Other models we estimated included measures of percent of the Black population squared in attempts to model Blalock’s thesis of a positive influence of percent Black population with a decreasing slope—that is, we anticipated a reduction in White interracial homicide as the Black population reaches a point of concentration in these cities. This measure was correlated above .9 with the 1980 interracial homicide measure and could not be estimated without producing collinearity problems. Variance Inflation Factors (VIF) were not available in the software program for Poisson; however, VIFs derived from OLS regressions estimated for these models (while using the log transformed dependent variables) revealed VIF values between 11 and 13 for the percent Black squared measure. Nevertheless, we found no major substantive difference in the findings among the change measures in our models when the quadratic term was included. In addition, the murder rate was initially introduced as a control as did Jacobs and Wood (1999) but VIFs above 5 and 6 also indicated estimation problems.

8. Evidence of potential partialing problems was explored by estimating separate equations by omitting variables with bi-variate correlations above .5. This revealed problems with the percentage Black population measure in the White interracial homicide model. Omitting this variable resulted in the following additional statistically significant variables in the indicated direction: Black mayor 1980 (), racial labor market competition (), south (), change 1980–1990 Black mayor (, p .09, one-tailed), and change 1980–1990 race segregation ()—all differences, by and large, supporting the hypotheses. Results from the alternative model showed no major substantive changes in statistical significance of the coefficients. The correlation matrix is provided in the Appendix.

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Appendix

Correlation Matrices for White-on-Black (upper diagonal) and Black-on-White (lower diagonal) Interracial Homicide

Offending, 1980 Independent Variables and 1990–1980 Change Measures (“D”), N = 146

Y1 X1 X2 X3 X4 X5 X6 X7 X8 X9

Y1: Interracial hom. 1990 1.00 .975 .097 .080 .123 .045 .096 .150 .150 −.060

X1: Interracial hom. 1980 .977 1.00 .134 −.049

X2: Percent Black .170 .220 1.00 .170

X3: Black mayor .211 .244 .489 1.00 .273

X4: Ratio B/W not employed .160 .162 .140 .044 1.00 .011

X5: Ratio W/B med. income .089 .089 .376 .100 .529 1.00 −.077

X6: Race-specific poverty .062 .105 .473 .067 .409 .590 1.00 .097 .306 −.176

X7: Racial segregation .150 .211 .565 .090 .261 .418 .584 1.00

X8: Percent Hispanic .150 .142 −.278 −.014 −.127 −.247 −.221 −.340 1.00

X9: South −.049 −.058 .392 −.020 .146 .437 .220 .379 −.106 1.00

X10: West −.026 −.034 −.396 .050 −.209 −.310 −.441 −.467 .269 −.482

X11: Northeast .126 .134 .038 −.043 −.142 .021 .291 .011 .059 −.307

X12: Midwest −.027 −.015 −.038 .006 .202 −.178 −.014 .087 −.245 −.346

X13: D-Percent Black −.029 −.014 .391 .009 −.100 −.016 .254 .148 −.327 .117

X14: D-Black mayor .257 .294 .243 −.164 −.064 −.026 .114 .171 −.055 .034

X15: D-B/W not employed −.042 −.035 −.083 .133 −.177 −.144 −.086 .043 −.005 −.152

X16: D-W/B med. income −.067 −.067 .105 .136 .036 .042 .130 .253 −.307 .081

X17: D-Race-specific poverty −.091 −.091 −.137 −.025 −.016 −.218 −.161 .114 −.202 −.137

X18: D-Racial segregation .304 .343 .516 .305 .288 .272 .412 .307 −.091 −.039

X19: D-Percent Hispanic .136 .126 −.265 −.017 −.263 −.175 −.225 −.329 .613 −.207

A DYNAMIC MODEL OF RACIAL COMPETITION 293

Y1: Interracial hom. 1990 −.044 .183 −.045 .005 .297 −.076 −.082 −.035 .252 .099

X1: Interracial hom. 1980 −.058 .159 −.020 .012 .276 −.050 −.060 −.009 .317 .100

X2: Percent Black −.103

X3: Black mayor −.084

X4: Ratio B/W not employed −.073

X5: Ratio W/B med. income −.272

X6: Race-specific poverty −.061 .384 −.073 .005 .050 .026 −.042 −.085 .352 .102

X7: Racial segregation .092

X8: Percent Hispanic .146

X9: South −.079

X10: West 1.00 .086

X11: Northeast −.293 1.00 −.267

X12: Midwest −.330 −.211 1.00 .240

X13: D-Percent Black −.375 .169 .146 1.00 .187

X14: D-Black mayor −.114 .164 −.057 .186 1.00 −.046

X15: D-B/W not employed .173 −.111 .081 −.273 −.060 1.00 .028

X16: D-W/B med. income −.116 −.222 .246 .106 −.082 .404 1.00 .121

X17: D-Race-specific poverty .037 −.328 .423 .147 −.056 .299 .592 1.00 −.135 .044

X18: D-Racial segregation −.205 .225 .081 .153 .197 .100 .170 −.031 1.00

X19: D-Percent Hispanic .216 .293 −.277 −.271 −.046 −.019 −.308 −.285 −.092 1.00

Note: Correlations among independent variables provided in the White on Black (upper diagonal) only when the variables differ for the interracial models.

PERCEPTIONS OF RACIAL GROUP COMPETITION:EXTENDING BLUMER’S THEORY OF GROUP POSITION TO A MULTIRACIAL CONTEXT

GARY KLECK

Florida State University

Reevaluation of published research on racial bias in criminal sentencing and of data on execution rates by race from 1930 to 1967 and on death-sentencing rates from 1967 to 1978 indicates that, except in the South, black homicide offenders have been less likely than whites to receive a death sentence or be executed. For the 11% of executions imposed for rape, discrimination against black defendants who had raped white victims was substantial, but only in the South. Evidence for noncapital sentencing also largely contradicts a hypothesis of overt discrimination against black defendants. Although black offender-white victim crimes are generally punished more severely than crimes involving other racial combinations, this appears to be due to legally relevant factors related to such offenses. Crimes with black victims, however, are less likely than those with white victims to result in imposition of the death penalty. The devalued status of black crime victims is one of several hypothetical explanations of the more lenient sentencing of black defendants.

The legitimacy of the legal systems of modern democracies depends heavily on the degree to which the systems operate in a manner consistent with their own stated procedural standards of justice. It has been argued that Western societies, including the United States, are undergoing a “legitimation crisis” and that this is occurring specifically in criminal justice systems at least partly because they fail to live up to their stated commitments to treatment of defendants without regard to ascribed personal characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender or partially ascribed characteristics such as status or class position (Quinney, 1974; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971).’

It is widely believed, and frequently stated, that the criminal justice system has been in the past, and remains, racially discriminatory (e.g., Sutherland and Cressey, 1970; Clark, 1970). The most frequently cited category of evidence for this assertion has been research indicating more severe sentencing of black criminal defendants than white defendants, especially in imposition of the death penalty. As there have been at least sixty empirical studies of adult criminal sentencing published which refer to race, it is not surprising that at least one critic of the criminal justice system has asserted that evidence on racial discrimination in sentencing is probably the strongest evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system (Over by, 1971:575). Because the outcomes of sentencing decisions are among the most visible of legal processing, the legal system’s claim to legitimacy is especially dependent on the public’s perception of the pattern of such outcomes. Therefore, it seems particularly important to take a close look at evidence bearing on this issue.

The first part of this paper attempts a comprehensive assessment of the published scholarly empirical research on racial bias in criminal sentencing in the U.S. in connection with both capital punishment and noncapital sentencing. One of the principal sources of distortion regarding this issue in the past has been selective citation of studies supporting one position or another; therefore, great care has been I As used in this paper the word “race” is socially defined, referring to “a human group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as different from other groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics” (van den Berghe, 1967:9). taken to be as exhaustive as possible in finding relevant studies. The second part of the paper presents new evidence on race and capital punishment, consisting of an analysis of execution rates for blacks and whites over the period 1930 to 1967, for the United States as a whole and for the South, and of death-sentencing rates for the period from 1967 to 1978.

The Varieties of Racial Bias: Some Conceptual Distinctions

At least five different practices can produce racial differentials in criminal sentences which are likely to be viewed as illegitimate or unjust.

(/) Overt racial discrimination against minority defendants. This refers to the imposition of more severe dispositions on members of a subordinate racial group, independent of their legally relevant individual merits, and primarily as a direct result of the conscious or unconscious racial prejudice of the sentencing decision makers.

(2) Disregard for minority crime victims. This would include the failure to sentence offenders (of any race) who victimize minority-group members as severely as those who victimize nonminority-group members.

(3) Class discrimination. This refers to more severe treatment of lower-class defendants as a consequence of class prejudice. It may be due to hostility or indifference of middle-class decision makers toward culturally different defendants, or because lower-class defendants better fit popular stereotypes of serious or dangerous criminals. Because blacks in. the United States are disproportionately members of the lower class, class discrimination would affect them more heavily than whites, independent of any overt racial discrimination. This assumes that among the set of criminal defendants blacks are more likely to be lower class than whites, a debatable assumption considering the overwhelmingly lower-class character of criminal defendants of all races.

(4) Economic discrimination. When a society’s legal system is structured so that significant private economic resources are required in order to effectively obtain full legal protection, this constitutes economic discrimination, even where there is no class discrimination (as defined above). If low-income defendants receive more severe sentences than middle-income defendants because they cannot afford to hire an outside private attorney or cannot make bail, this constitutes economic discrimination and could produce racial differentials in sentencing outcomes.

(5) Institutional Racism. This refers to the application, possibly in a universalistic fashion, of decision making standards which in themselves have considerable consensual support (possibly even among minority members) but which result in less favorable outcomes for minority defendants. As used in the past, the term seems to have referred to, among other things, practices (2) through (4); but institutional racism in sentencing can take other forms as well. For example, if racial-minority defendants are likelier to have prior criminal convictions, then the use of prior record as a criterion for sentence determination will tend to produce less favorable outcomes for minority defendants and would therefore be an instance of institutional racism (for this view, see Burke and Turk, 1975, or Farrell and Swigert, 1978a). The establishment, by legislatures, of higher statutory penalties for crimes committed more frequently by racial minority members than by others (such as violent interpersonal crimes) would also constitute institutional racism, regardless of the behavior of judges, prosecutors, and others who influence sentencing outcomes.

For the sake of verbal and conceptual clarity, it is misleading to label either (3) or (4) ” racial” bias or discrimination. Although clearly unjust and certainly related to race in the United States, these practices are not directly racial in themselves, since they affect whites as well as blacks and could occur in jurisdictions or societies where no racial distinctions of any sort were made. Therefore, although reference will be made to them in examining the evidence regarding overt racial discrimination, these practices are not themselves primary objects of the analysis.

The concept of institutional racism is highly problematical. It is so flexible that any practice producing unfavorable sentencing outcomes for racial-minority members can be characterized as racist, no matter how the outcomes were produced, whether they were intentionally sought, and regardless of what criteria were involved in the decisions producing the outcomes. Any pattern of sentencing involving the crimes commonly dealt with by U.S. criminal courts could be construed as institutional racism, since blacks commit a disproportionate share of such crimes relative to their share of the population (see Hindelang, 1978, for a thorough discussion of the evidence for this statement) and therefore are bound to receive a disproportionate share of the criminal punishment, no matter how fairly the sentencing process is administered. Only an alteration of the social conditions producing differentials in the racial distribution of criminal behavior or a radical redefinition of which crimes the courts focus on could eliminate institutional racism of this sort. For these reasons, neither this study nor any other study of sentencing per se could reject the hypothesis of institutional racism in sentencing. Consequently, attention in this analysis will be primarily focused on overt racial discrimination and secondarily on disregard for minority crime victims.

ASSESSMENT OF PRIOR RESEARCH

This review is intended to be an exhaustive assessment of all scholarly empirical studies of race and criminal sentencing of adults in the United States published up through 1979. It does not cover the few studies relating ethnicity and sentencing, such as Castberg (1971) or Hall and Simkus (1975), nor studies of conviction, as opposed to sentencing, such as Forslund (1969). It does cover studies of the determination of degree of homicide of which defendants were convicted, such as Farrell and Swigert (1978a; 1978b), since such a determination is tantamount to determination of sentence. Also included are studies of commutations of death sentences, as these have commonly been cited as sentencing studies.

When two or more studies of the same data set, using very similar methods, have been published, only one is included, or the studies are treated as a single study (e.g., Wolfgang and Riedel, 1973 and 1975; Farrell and Swigert, 1978a and 1978b, and Swigert and Farrell, 1977; Lotz and Hewitt, 1977 and Hewitt, 1976). Studies of juvenile court dispositions are excluded since, properly speaking, juveniles are not sentenced to criminal penalties and determination of disposition is in any case substantially different from the adult sentencing process.2 Further, the following kinds of studies are excluded: anecdotal or journalistic accounts, case studies, hypothetical-case sentencing studies (e.g., Johnston et al., 1973), purely theoretical studies, and other reviews of the literature. The review also ignores studies such as those of Sellin (1928, 1935) which simply compare sentence lengths of persons sentenced or executed, without any comparison to numbers arrested, convicted, etc. Finally, unpublished studies such as dissertations are excluded because the availability of such material is limited.

Studies which fit the selection criteria were located through an iterative search process. An initial list of relevant studies was compiled through a search of Sociological Abstracts, Crime and Delinquency Abstracts, Legal Abstracts, and Hagan’s (1974) bibliography. (About one-third of the studies reviewed here were also included in Hagan’s review.)

2 Liska and Tausig (1979) reviewed eight studies which examined race and juvenile court dispositions, noting that five of them show a significant race effect in the conventionally expected direction. However, only two of the five simultaneously controlled for offense seriousness and prior record. The crude state of research in this field is also indicated by the almost complete absence of attention to controlling for effects of juveniles’ family circumstances or disposition. Although the philosophy of the juvenile court explicitly defines family stability as a legitimate factor to be considered, Liska and Tausig do not say a word suggesting that racial differences in family intactness could account for differences in juvenile court dispositions. 3 However, for a sampling of recent doctoral dissertation on the subject the reader may consult Dison (1976), Hutner (1977), and San Marco (1979). A reading of their abstracts indicates findings highly congruent with the conclusion of my review

Then the references listed in each of these studies were examined for further relevant studies, and so on, until no further leads were uncovered.

Capital Punishment Sentencing Studies

Table 1 summarizes in compact form the prior scholarly empirical research on racial discrimination and use of the death penalty, first regarding murder and then rape. The last column indicates whether racial differences were statistically significant and in the predicted direction. In a minority of studies my assessment of the evidence presented in a study differs from that of the authors. Two examples of this are noteworthy.

Bedau (1964) concluded that there was racial bias in the final disposition of persons sentenced to death, despite his own acknowledgment that his data showed no significant relationship between race and final disposition, and despite the fact that the observed relationship was in the opposite direction to that indicating discrimination against nonwhites. In New Jersey 66.2% of nonwhites sentenced to die were executed, compared to 68.4% of whites (Bedau, 1964:19). Further, Bedau claimed there was no significant relationship between race and execution when felony and non-felony murders were separated, but reanalysis of his data reveals that in fact nonwhite murderers were significantly less likely to be executed for felony killings than were white felony murderers (X2 = 8.114, 1 degree of freedom, p = .01). There was no race difference for non felony killings.

Bowers (1974:81-107) claimed to have found evidence which pointed “unmistakably to a pattern of racial discrimination in the administration of capital punishment in America” (p. 10). His conclusion was not limited to the South or to use of the death penalty for rape, although he laid particular stress on these areas. Regarding racial bias in use of the death penalty for murder, the evidence that Bowers produced was of two kinds: he argued first that the lower mean age at execution of nonwhites compared to whites was evidence of racial discrimination, and, second, that the lower percentage of cases appealed by nonwhites compared to whites indicated discrimination. While Bowers acknowledged that the age differentials at execution may simply reflect age differences at commission of the offense and arrest, he argued that the difference at arrest was not as large as that at execution. In fact, there was a 2.4 year difference in mean age at execution in Bowers’ data (p. 80), while Wolfgang’s (1958:70) homicide arrest data indicate an almost identical 2.3 year difference in the median age of black and white male homicide arrestees. Regarding the data on appeals, racial differentials in percentage receiving appeals of death sentences for murder since 1940 are largely confined to the South (see especially Bowers’ Table 3-9), consistent with our interpretation of the findings of previous death-penalty discrimination studies. Nevertheless, Bowers concludes that, as indicated by age differentials at execution and differentials in percentage receiving higher appeals, ” racial discrimination in northern and western states began to rival that in the South, at least for the period of decline in capital punishment” (1974:104).

Probably the most serious shortcoming of death-penalty discrimination studies is that they nearly all fail to control for prior criminal record. The one study which introduced such a control, Judson et al. (1969), found no evidence of racial discrimination, suggesting that apparent racial differences in other studies may actually have been due to racial differences in prior criminal activity. This hypothesis is supported by Wolfgang’s (1958:175-6) findings that black homicide offenders were significantly more likely to have previous criminal arrest records than white homicide offenders. It is further supported by Hagan’s (1974:366-8) reanalysis of Nagel (1969), which indicated that where crude controls for prior record (record/no record) were introduced, racial effects shrank. Where more adequate controls for prior record (number of prior convictions) were introduced, the racial difference disappeared altogether (Judson et al., 1969:1366-76), suggesting that the dichotomous measure of prior record may be inadequate for control purposes (see also Green, 1961:11 on this point).

All of the studies purporting to find racial bias in use of the death penalty for murder failed to control for income, class, or occupation of the defendants.4 However, the most methodologically sophisticated study of the subject, which did control for defendant’s occupation, found no racial effect on whether or not a death sentence was imposed for murder by California penalty juries (Judson et al., 1969:1366-76). Further, they found no relationship between the victim/offender racial relationship and sentence imposed, suggesting that the findings of Johnson (1941) and Garfunkel (1949) may have reflected regional and temporal peculiarities characteristic of North Carolina (or more generally, the South) in the 1930s and earlier.

Several points should be noted about the pattern of findings on discrimination in use of the death penalty for murder. First, every single study consistently indicating discrimination towards blacks was based on older data from Southern states, and three of these four studies were based on overlapping data from North Carolina. Second, all of the studies finding discrimination in administration of capital punishment for murder were not in fact studies of sentencing, although most of them have been cited in the research literature as if they were. Mangum (1940), Johnson (1957), Wolfgang et al. (1962), and Bridge and Mosure (1961) all studied commutation of death sentences, not sentencing itself, while Bowers’ (1974) data largely concerned appeals of death sentences. Third, all of these studies failed to control for prior criminal record of the defendant, for the defendant’s class or income, or for the distinction between felony and non felony killings. Since studies which do introduce such controls find that they reduce the sentencing differentials between blacks and whites (Green, 1961; Judson et al., 1969; Nagel, 1969), even in the South the racial differential may have been due to differences in criminal record, income, or type of homicide committed rather than discrimination. The evidence considered as a whole indicates no racial discrimination in use of the death penalty for murder outside the South, and even for the South empirical support for the discrimination hypothesis is weak.

Regarding the use of capital punishment for rape, the evidence strongly suggests overt discrimination against black defendants. Four of the studies of this issue found evidence of discrimination, while the relationship between race and the carrying out of the death sentence (as opposed to commutation of the sentence) was not significant in the Johnson (1957) study, according to Hagan’s (1964:370) reanalysis. The relationships found in the other four studies (Johnson, 1970; Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Partington, 1965; Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973, 1975) are very strong, and the evidence indicates that the death penalty for rape was largely used for punishing blacks who had raped whites. Although all of these studies were methodologically crude, it is doubtful if additional controls could eliminate the huge racial differentials in use of the death penalty. The importance of this conclusion, however, is limited by several facts. First, the death penalty has rarely been used to punish rape. Only 11.8% of the executions from 1930 to the present were for rape. Virtually all the rest were for murder. Second, the use of the death penalty for rapes has always been, at least since national data on executions were first gathered in 1930, strictly a peculiarity of the South. Not a single execution for rape occurred outside the South or the border states during that period (U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1970). Third, the imposition of death sentences for rape has virtually disappeared. Of the 183 persons who were sentenced to death during 1978, only one was sentenced for rape (U.S. NCJISS, 1979:25). Thus, the rape discrimination conclusion is of historical significance with regard to capital punishment in the South, but has limited relevance to current debates over capital punishment, especially since the United 4Although both Wolfgang et al. (1962) and Johnson (1957) had data on occupation of offenders as well as race, they did not attempt to simultaneously control for race and occupation. No explanation of this conspicuous omission was offered in either study. States Supreme Court declared, in Coker vs. Georgia (1977), that the use of the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman was a disproportionate penalty and therefore unconstitutional (U.S. NCJISS, 1979:2).

Noncapital Punishment Sentencing

Studies summarizes the empirical research on sentencing involving penalties other than the death penalty. The results of each study are simply summarized in the last column of the table (“Discrimination?”), with each study characterized as to whether its findings largely supported a discrimination hypothesis (indicated by “Yes”), were mostly inconsistent with such a hypothesis (“No”), or were only partially consistent with the hypothesis (“Mixed”). Mixed findings most frequently occurred when more than one crime was studied, when sentencing patterns of a number of judges were reviewed, or when more than one measure of sentencing outcome was examined.

Studies were classified, in somewhat arbitrary fashion, according to what proportion of their findings were in favor of the discrimination hypothesis. They were characterized as mixed if from one-third to one-half (inclusive) of the findings favored the discrimination hypothesis and as favorable to the hypothesis if more than one-half of the findings favored it. For example, if a study examined eight different offenses, it would be labeled “Yes” if evidence of bias against black defendants was found for four or more offenses, as “Mixed” if such evidence was found for three of the offenses, and as “No” if two or fewer offenses showed such evidence. Since it could -be argued that evidence of discrimination even for one crime or sentence-outcome measure out of many is evidence worth taking very seriously, readers must judge for themselves the significance of the “mixed” findings.

Under the heading “Sentencing Measure” in Table 2, the dependent variable in each study is noted. The term “disposition” indicates that the dependent variable distinguished between categories like probation, jail sentence, prison sentence, etc., while “sentence severity” denotes a single scale of severity of disposition or sentence constructed by the researcher. The other terms are self-explanatory.

Table 2 also indicates whether the authors of these studies in any way controlled for the type of criminal offense involved. In those studies where only one type of crime was involved, or where several very similar offenses were studied, such a control was obviously unnecessary. However, where several different offense types were lumped together, as in Cargan and Coates (1974) or Pope (1975a), differences in sentence received by black and white defendants could be at least partly attributable to differences in the seriousness of the types of offenses for which they were prosecuted.

Of the 40 studies listed in Table 2, only eight consistently support the racial discrimination hypothesis, while 12 are mixed and the remaining 20 produced evidence consistently contrary to the hypothesis. Since a study’s findings were characterized as mixed even if as few as a third of them favored the discrimination hypothesis, this means that a substantial majority of all of the findings of these 40 studies contradicted the hypothesis.

However, the evidence for the hypothesis is even weaker than these numbers suggest, since of the minority of studies which produced findings apparently in support of the hypothesis, most either failed completely to control for prior criminal record of the defendant, or did so using the crudest possible measure of prior record-a simple dichotomy distinguishing defendants with some record from those without one. This is probably the most important flaw in studies drawing a conclusion of racial discrimination, 5 Use of these standards occasionally resulted in characterizations of findings which differed from those of the original authors (e.g., Bedau, 1964). Since I attempted to accurately reflect the studies’ theoretical or ideological preferences, when the original authors’ conclusions did not seem congruent with their data, their conclusions were discounted. Skeptical readers are encouraged to examine the original studies in order to judge for. Themselves the accuracy of my characterizations. It, NJ since the most methodologically sophisticated sentencing studies have consistently shown various measures of prior record to be either the strongest predictor, or among the strongest predictors, of sentences received (Chiricos and Waldo, 1975; Bernstein et al., 1977; Lotz and Hewitt, 1977; Lizotte, 1978). It appears to be the case that the more adequate the control for prior record, the less likely it is that a study will produce findings supporting a discrimination hypothesis.

Table 3 summarizes the whole body of prior research on race and sentencing, both capital and noncapital. Simply adding up the number of studies favoring or not favoring the discrimination hypothesis could be somewhat misleading, since some studies are clearly better than other s and should therefore be weighted more heavily than others in assessing the body of evidence as a whole. Therefore, although it would be difficult to assign exact weights, some simple quality distinctions can be made, such as distinguishing between studies which control for prior criminal record and studies which do not. Regarding noncapital punishment, Table 3 makes clear the importance of such controls-one-third of the studies without a control for prior criminal record support a discrimination conclusion, while less than a tenth of those with such controls support a discrimination conclusion. Regarding capital punishment, separate tallies of studies with and without such controls are unnecessary, since only one study, that of Judson and his colleagues (1969), controlled for prior record, finding no evidence of racial discrimination either in the sentencing of black defendants in general or in sentencing of those who had victimized whites.

Interracial Relationship of Offender and Victim

It has long been argued that racial bias in sentencing is not to be detected only by looking at the race of the defendant, but by noting the racial relationship of the offender and the victim (e.g., Johnson, 1941). Specifically, it is asserted that crimes involving black offenders and white victims are punished more severely than crimes involving the other three racial combinations, either because crimes involving black victims are taken less seriously or because the crossing of racial lines in the commission of a crime is taken very seriously (Johnson, 1941; Garfunkel, 1949). While black offender-white victim crimes, especially homicides and rapes, are punished more severely than crimes with other racial combinations, it is unclear whether this is due to the racial character of the crime, or to related, confounding factors. Black offender-white victim killings are more likely than other killings to involve an offender and a victim who are strangers to each other, and such killings are much more severely punished regardless of the races involved (Lundsgaarde, 1977:232). Such killings are also more likely to be committed in connection with some other felony, like robbery. Data in Block and Zimring (1973:8) indicate that for Chicago homicides in 1970, 38% of killings with black offenders and white victims were robbery killings, while only 5% of the white offender-white victim killings were robbery killings. Felony killings are punished more severely than other homicides, regardless of races involved (Wolfgang et al., 1962; Bedau, 1964; Wolf, 1964). Finally, black-white killings are less likely than black-black killings to be victim precipitated, and victim-precipitated killings in turn are less likely to be premeditated (Wolfgang, 1958), leading one to expect less severe punishment of black on black killings for this reason, rather than the racial relationship per se. Eleven studies have examined sentencing outcomes by racial combination, and of these, seven (Johnson, 1941; Garfunkel, 1949; Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Howard, 1967; Southern Regional Council, 1969; Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973; Zimring et al., 1976) found more severe punishment for black-white offenses.6 However, none of these studies controlled for the possibly confounding factors we have mentioned. The only four studies which did introduce such controls (Green, 1964; Judson et al., 1969; Farrell and Swigert, 1978b; Myers, 1979) all found no evidence of such sentencing patterns. Thus, consideration of the pattern of findings as a whole strongly suggests that the interracial relationship itself does not affect the sentencing decision, except in connection with the punishment of rape in the South (Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Howard, 1967; and Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973, 1975 support this limited assertion of discrimination).

Table 3. Summary of Prior Research

Results:

Yes Mixed No Total

Capital Sentencing

All Studies 7 4 6 17

Murder 3 4 5 12

Rape 4 0 1 5

Noncapital Sentencing

All Studies 8 12 20 40

Control for prior record 2 8 13 23

No control for prior record 6 4 7 17

NOTE: See the discussion of prior literature in the text for an explanation of the classification of studies by their results.

Examination of prior studies on the question of racial discrimination and use of the death penalty for murder has suggested that many of their conclusions may be seriously time-bound and regionbound. Their findings may not be generalizable to areas outside the South, considering the generally contrary findings of studies of non-Southern jurisdictions using more recent data. Given these considerations, it would seem reasonable to study national sentencing practices, making regional comparisons, using data covering as long a period of time as possible.

EXECUTION RATES AND DEATH SENTENCING BY RACE

It has been claimed that “racial discrimination is strongly suggested by the national execution figures” (NAACP, 1971: 51-2). Clearly, blacks have been executed in numbers far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Over the period 1930-1976, 53.6% of all legally executed persons in the United States were black, although blacks constituted only about 10-11% of the U.S. population during that period (U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1971:8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1977:25). This disproportion, however, cannot in itself be taken as evidence of racial discrimination, since blacks also commit a large proportion of U.S. homicides, the crime most frequently punished by death. A more meaningful measure of capital punishment sentencing outcome would be an indicator of execution risk, i.e., an execution rate. A true rate compares a number of events (such as executions) with the number of times the event could have occurred. Therefore, the ideal base for the execution rate could be the number of persons convicted of a capital offense, i.e., a crime for which, in a given jurisdiction, the offender could be sentenced to death. However, there are no national data on the number of such crimes committed or on persons arrested for the crimes. Therefore, a surrogate measure is needed.

In this analysis, execution risk by race is measured as the number of executions (for murder) of persons of a given race in a given year, divided by the number of homicide victims of that race who died in the previous year. The number of homicide victims of a given race is used as an approximation of the number of persons of that race who committed a homicide, whether a capital murder or a noncapital murder.7 Since 92-97% of all homicides involve killers and victims of the same race (Garfunkel, 1949:371; Harlan, 1950:745; Wolfgang, 1958:379; Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:51; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1977:9), the racial distribution of homicide victims can be used to describe the racial distribution of homicide offenders with very little error (Wolfgang, 1958:223).

6 Although Bullock (1961) has been cited in connection with the issue of sentencing and interracial relationships (e.g., Hindelang, 1969 and Baab and Ferguson, 1968), his study did not actually contain any data on victim-offender racial relationships.

7 Execution rates for rape cannot be computed because there are no comparable data to use for the base of the rate. There were no national data on rape victimizations by race up until 1973 (by which time the judicial moratorium on execution had begun and even the imposition of death sentences for rape had virtually disappeared). In any case, the evidence showing discrimination in capital punishment of rape is fairly conclusive, making the computation of such rates redundant.

Since there is a median lag between arrest and a court trial for criminal homicide of slightly under six months (Wolfgang, 1958:296, 299), and a mean lag of about one year between conviction and execution (Lunden, 1962:1043; McCafferty, 1967:95; U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1970), the appropriate comparison for our purposes is between the executions in year t and arrests in year t- 1, or possibly year t-2. For the sake of simplicity, the execution rates assume a one-year lag between commission of the homicide and execution of the offender over the time period studied. In any case, the results assuming a two-year lag would be substantively identical.

Table 4 presents the computed execution rates for blacks and whites, covering the entire period for which national execution data is available, 1930-1967.8 In the final column, a ratio greater than one indicates a black execution rate higher than the white execution rate; therefore, for 25 of 38 of the years examined, the black execution rate was lower than the white execution rate. Since they are based on fairly small numbers of executions, race specific execution rates and ratios of execution rates are somewhat unstable for single years, especially for the later years in the time series. Therefore the rates for the entire period were computed. For the period 1930-1967 there were 1,663 executions of whites for murder and 1,638 executions of blacks, while for the period 1929-1966 (lagged one year behind the other period) there were 159,482 white homicide victims and 168,518 black homicide victims (and presumably roughly equal numbers of homicide offenders). Therefore, the white execution rate for the entire period was 10.428 executions per 1,000 homicides and the black rate was 9.720 executions per 1,000 homicides. Thus, over the entire period, blacks were subject to a lower execution risk than whites.

Given the regional pattern of discrimination findings of previous studies of capital punishment sentencing, it may be the case that execution rates are higher for blacks than for whites in the South and that this fact is obscured in national data. It is also possible that the relative execution risks of blacks and whites changes over time and by region. These possibilities are addressed using the data in Table 5.

These data indicate that the execution risk of black homicide offenders (actually nonwhites in this analysis) has indeed been greater than that of white homicide offenders in the South, while the opposite has been true in the rest of the United States. However, the excess of the black execution risk over the white execution risk in the South has declined over time, to the point where execution rates were roughly equal in the period since 1950. The evidence, considered in combination with prior research on capital punishment sentencing outcomes, suggests that use of the death penalty is not inevitably or inherently discriminatory, but rather that racial discrimination in its administration has been highly variable over time and between regions. These data support the racial discrimination hypothesis in connection with death penalty sentencing only for the South. Of particular interest is the somewhat surprising finding that in the recent past, outside of the South, the white execution risk has been substantially higher than the nonwhite risk, a fact which apparently has gone unnoticed in the literature. Possible explanations of this phenomenon will be discussed later in the paper.

8 The number of homicide victims of each race excludes executions and killings committed by policemen in the line of duty. Executions are excluded because it is undesirable to have a common component in the numerator and denominator of the execution rate. Police killings are excluded because they are nearly always considered justifiable homicides and therefore not criminal. These exclusions make the homicide victim figures somewhat better surrogates for figures on criminal homicide offenders.

9 It is debatable whether statistical tests of significance are appropriate where population data are involved, although Blalock (1972:238-9) has argued that they can serve to rule out an alternative explanation of a set of results-that the data could have been generated by chance processes rather than causal ones. A two-sample test of the difference between the proportions of persons executed among blacks and whites indicates the difference is significant at the .05 level (two-tailed test, Z=2.03).

Table 4. Execution Rates by Race, 1930-1967

Black-Black, White-White, Black-White Ratio of Black Executions Homicide Executions Homicide Execution  to White

Year for Murder Victims a for Murder Victims a Rate B Rate C Execution Rates

1967 1 1 – 0.168 0.191 0.880

1966 0 5,945 1 5,230 0.000 0.205 0.000

1965 1 5,408 6 4,879 0.203 1.336 0.152

1964 4 4,926 5 4,492 0.893 1.197 0.748

1963 6 4,478 12 4,176 1.375 2.918 0.471

1962 15 4,364 26 4,112 3.583 6.468 0.554

1961 15 4,187 18 4.020 3.568 4.688 0.761

1960 26 4,204 18 3,840 6.394 4.826 1.325

1959 26 4,066 15 3,730 6.619 4.260 1.554

1958 20 3,928 20 3,521 5.040 6.073 0.839

1957 22 3,968 32 3,293 5.479 9.718 0.564

1956 31 4,015 20 3,239 8.105 6.240 1.299

1955 24 3,825 41 3,205 5.954 12.387 0.481

1954 33 4,031 37 3,310 8.317 11.315 0.735

1953 25 3,968 25 3,270 5.840 7.492 0.779

1952 36 4,281 35 3,337 9.217 10.965 0.841

1951 31 3,906 55 3,192 7.463 16.965 0.456

1950 32 4,154 36 3,362 7.402 9.882 0.749

1949 56 4,323 49 3,643 12.216 12.626 0.967

1948 61 4,584 32 3,880 13.475 8.095 1.664

1947 89 4,527 40 3,953 18.924 10.005 1.891

1946 61 4,703 45 3,998 15.877 12.879 1.233

1945 52 3,842 37 3,494 14.790 12.445 1.188

1944 48 3,516 45 2,973 13.829 14.227 0.972

1943 63 3,471 54 3,163 14.593 16.162 0.903

1942 58 4,317 57 3,341 13.075 16.681 0.784

1941 46 4,436 55 3,417 10.426 14.773 0.706

1940 61 4,412 44 3,723 13.610 11.429 1.191

1939 63 4,482 79 3,850 14.338 18.283 0.784

1938 63 4,394 89 4,321 13.011 20.408 0.638

1937 62 4,842 67 4,361 12.086 13.405 0.902

1936 93 5,130 86 4,998 18.383 15.826 1.162

1935 66 5,059 115 5,434 12.028 18.338 0.656

1934 89 5,487 64 6,271 17:056 9.672 1.763

1933 74 5,218 75 6,617 16.122 12.093 1.333

1932 63 4,590 62 6,202 13.322 10.003 1.332

1931 57 4,749 76 6,198 12.800 12.722 1.006

1930 57 4,453 90 5,974 13.106 16.474 0.796

1929 4,349 5,463

SOURCEU:. S., Federal Bureau of Prisons, National Prisoner Statistics, Bulletin No. 46 (1971),p . 8; U.S., National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the U.S.: Mortality, (annual issues, 1937-1966); U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Mortality Statistics, (annual issues, 1929-1936).

NOTE: There were no executions in the U.S., 1968-1976; complete execution figures by race for the U.S. before 1930a re not available. Mortality figures for 1929-1932 refer to the death registration area rather  than the entire U.S. (95.7% of the U.S. population was covered in 1929; 96.3% was covered in 1932). In 1929-1932 black homicide victim figures were estimated from “colored” homicide figures; the difference is very slight.

a. Excluding executions and killings by policemen in the line of duty for 1950-1967. Figures before 1950 exclude executions but include killings by police.

b Black execution rate is number of black executions in year t per 1,000 black homicide victims in year t-1.

C White execution rate is number of white executions in year t per 1,000 white homicide victims in year t-1.

Possible Biases in Computation of Execution Risk Our estimates of execution risk by race could be biased if the homicides which blacks commit are less likely to be capital murders than those committed by whites. If this were true, using the number of homicide victims of each race as the base of the execution rate would be misleading for comparative purposes, since a smaller proportion of the black offenders could be a In regional and state breakdowns of mortality by cause of death, the data refer only to white/ nonwhite, while the published accumulations for the United States refer to white, black, and other races. considered to be at risk of execution, compared to white offenders. In this case, the black execution would be understated relative to the white rate.

Table 5. Execution Rates for Groups of Years by

Region and Race

United States

Black Rate/ Years White Black and  White Rate

1930-1939 14.38 14.24 0.99

1940-1949 12.80 14.07 1.10

1950-1967 5.94 4.57 0.77

1930-1967 10.43 9.72 0.93

Nonwhite Rate/ White Nonwhite a White Rate South

1930-1939 11.01 f4.41 1.31

1940-1949 11i24 14.26 1.27

1950-1967 5.02 5.30 1.06

1930-1967 8.39 10.47 1.25

Non-South

1930-1939 15.08 12.56 0.83

1940-1949 13.61 13.78 1.01

1950-1967 6.11 3.34 0.55

1930-1967 11.00 9.32 0.85

Three studies report figures on the percentage of criminal homicides designated as first degree (capital) murders, by race. One found the percentage designated first degree murder, both at indictment and at conviction, to be higher for blacks than for whites (Garfunkel, 1949:372), and one found the opposite (Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:43, 45, 88), while the third study found no significant difference (Wolfgang, 1958:302-03). Thus, no consistent relationship was found between race and proportion of criminal homicides designated first degree murder.

However, it has been argued that the designation of degree of homicide could itself be racially biased (Garfunkel, 1949). Would there be a racial difference if the degree of homicide were designated without bias? Given the hypothetical nature of the question, this is not easy to answer directly; however, we can evaluate it indirectly. It is generally agreed that there are a number of factors which can legitimately affect the designation of degree, including whether or not the homicide was committed in connection with another felony (called “felony killings”), whether the killing involved excessive violence or brutality, and of course whether or not the crime seemed to be premeditated. There is no direct evidence on premeditation by race. Wolfgang’s (1958:376) data indicate that a higher proportion of killings committed by whites are committed in connection with robberies than are killings by blacks, suggesting that a higher proportion of white killings might be felony killings, compared to killings by blacks. However, the difference is slight, and this finding has not been corroborated elsewhere. On the other hand, Wolfgang (1958) found no significant relationship between race and the tendency to inflict multiple acts of violence, while black homicide arrestees were significantly more likely to have prior arrest records than white homicide arrestees (Wolfgang, 1958:160, 175-6). Therefore, there is little evidence that would indicate that killings committed by blacks are significantly less likely to be capital murders than those committed by

whites.

There is another potential source of bias peculiar to the use of victim data by race as a surrogate for offender data by race. It was assumed that the number of offenders of one race would be roughly equal to the number of victims of that race. This assumption could be substantially incorrect, if, for example, killings involving black victims and white killers were more numerous than killings with white victims and black killers. If such were the case, the number of black victims would overestimate the number of black killers relative to white killers, and therefore underestimate the black execution rate relative to the white execution rate. Data relevant to this question are contained in the 1976 Uniform Crime Reports, which reported offender-victim racial relationships for murders and non negligent manslaughters (U.S. F.B.I., 1977). These data indicate that black offender-white victim killings are more numerous than white offender black victim killings. They further indicate that while only 53.2% of the 10,538 homicide victims were black, 55.8% of the known offenders were black. This finding suggests that use of victim data by race involves a bias whose correction would only strengthen our findings. Similar conclusions on victim-offender racial relationships could be drawn from data reported in smaller scale studies of criminal homicide (Garfunkel, 1949:371; Wolfgang, 1958:379; Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:51; and the seventeen-city study of Curtis, 1974:21).

Death-Sentencing Rates Execution rates, as we have measured them, reflect not only rates at which defendants are sentenced to death, but also the extent to which such sentences are successfully appealed or commuted to a lesser penalty. Therefore, a purer measure of the rate at which defendants are sentenced to death is desirable. Annual data on the number of persons sentenced to die has been compiled, by race of the offender, for the United States since 1967.

While this does not allow computation of death-sentencing rates for a very long period of time, it does update our analysis by providing information on the administration of capital punishment since the de facto moratorium on executions began in 1967. Death-sentencing rates were first computed in a fashion similar to the computation of execution rates: the number of death sentences (actually, persons received by U.S. prisons from the courts, sentence of death) for murder is compared with the number of homicides in the previous year, for each race. Then a second measure of the death-sentencing rate was computed. It could be argued that a better measure of the risk of receiving a death sentence would use persons arrested for, or convicted of, capital crimes as the base for the rate, since it is only such persons who are actually at risk of receiving a death sentence. While there are no national data on convictions for murder, there are national figures on persons arrested for murder or non-negligent manslaughter. Therefore, rates were computed using these figures for the base of the death-sentencing rate, again in a manner similar to the computation of execution rates.

Table 6 shows the computation of death-sentencing rates. The resulting rates, whether based on homicide deaths or homicide arrests, indicate that nonwhites were subject to a lower risk of being sentenced to death than whites over the period from 1967 to 1978. Because of the small numbers of death sentences each year, rates for single years are somewhat unstable, especially for 1972 and 1973. Nevertheless, the findings are on the whole quite consistent with the findings for execution rates.

This aggregate-level analysis does not show that there is never overt racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty for murder outside of the South. There may be discrimination in particular jurisdictions, in specific individual cases, or at specific, previously unstudied, stages in the legal process leading up to execution, although a close reading of previous studies of various stages in this process, such as arrest, indicate that, at least outside the South, overt racial discrimination may be more apparent than real, just as seems to be the case with sentencing (regarding arrest, see Green, 1970; Black, 1971; Monahan, 1972; Lundman et al., 1978).

What the present analysis does show is that regardless of whatever discrimination there may or may not be at particular stages in the legal process, the outcome is a lower execution rate for blacks than for whites. If there is discrimination against blacks at one or more stages, then, given the observed net result, it seems that there must also be some compensating effects, favoring blacks, at other stages.10 Likewise, if there is discrimination against blacks in one or more regions, jurisdictions, or specific cases, or with particular subtypes of homicides, then there must be some counterbalancing effects elsewhere.

The simple computation of execution and death-sentencing rates obviously does not in any way control for differences in prior criminal record (or other legally relevant variables, for that matter). Considering the stress laid on controlling for prior record earlier in the paper, this omission might seem to undercut confidence in the death penalty findings. However, because introduction of such controls has consistently reduced differences in sentencing outcome attributable to racial discrimination, correcting this omission would only tend to strengthen the conclusion of no overt discriminatory effect of homicide offenders’ racial identity. In connection with capital punishment of rape, controlling for prior criminal record would reduce the apparent discriminatory effect to some degree, but this effect is so large to begin with that it is doubtful if the conclusion of discrimination would have to be altered.

10 This possibility of a pattern of compensating discriminatory effects has been raised by Nagel and Neef (1977:185-8).

Table 6. Death-Sentencing Rates by Race, 1967-1978

Year Nonwhite White Ratio: Nonwhite/White Sentences per 1,000 Homicide Deaths a

1978 74/ 9,230 = 8.02 108/ 10,730 = 10.07 0.80

1977 64/ 9,439= 6.78 68/ 10,115= 6.72 1.01

1976 88/ 10,377 = 9.51 136/ 10,973 = 12.39 0.69

1975 143/ 10,817 = 13.22 121/ 10,648= 11.36 1.16

1974 65/ 10,291 = 6.32 67/ 9,789 = 6.84 0.92

1973 23/ 10,498 = 2.19 11/ 8,840 = 1.24 1.76

1972 40/ 10,226 = 3.91 26/ 8,561 = 3.04 1.29

1971 51/ 9,045 = 5.64 45/ 7,803 = 5.77 0.98

1970 52/ 8,461 = 6.15 64/ 7,016 = 9.12 0.67

1969 36/ 7,880 = 4.57 49/ 6,806 = 7.20 0.63

1968 45/ 7,027= 6.40 51/ 6,009= 8.49 0.75

1967 38/ 6,077 = 6.25 36/ 5,230 = 6.88 0.91

1967-78 719/109,328= 6.58 782/102,529= 7.63 0.86

Sentences per 1,000 Homicide Arrests

1978 74/ 9,256 = 7.99 108/ 7,866 = 13.73 0.58

1977 64/ 7,083 = 9.03 68/ 5,792 = 11.74 0.77

1976 88/ 8,592 = 10.24 136/ 6,581 = 20.67 0.50

1975 143/ 7,567 = 18.90 121/ 4,879 = 24.71 0.76

1974 65/ 7,677 = 8.74 67/ 5,236 = 12.80 0.66

1973 23/ 8,661 = 2.66 11/ 5,145 = 2.14 1.24

1972 40/ 8,586 = 4.66 26/ 4,716 = 5.51 0.85

1971 51/ 7,344 = 6.94 45/ 4,503 = 9.99 0.69

1970 52/ 6,669 = 7.79 64/ 3,743 = 17.10 0.46

1969 36/ 5,922 = 6.08 49/ 3,536 = 13.86 0.44

1968 45/ 5,018 = 8.97 51/ 3,200 = 15.94 0.56

1967 38/ 4,203 = 9.04 36/ 2,911 = 12.37 0.73

1967-78 719/ 86,578 = 8.30 782/ 58,126 = 13.45 0.62

Sources: Persons sentenced to death: U.S., NCJISS, Capital Punishment (1971-72; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1977; 1978).

Homicide deaths, 1966-76: U.S., NCHS, Vital Statistics of the United States: Mortality (Year) (1968-79).

Homicide deaths, 1977: U.S. NCHS, Monthly Vital Statistics Report: Advance Report: Final Mortality Statistics 1977 (1979).

Arrests, 1966-77: U.S., F.B.I., Crime in the United States (Year) (1967-1978).

A. Death sentences for murder, year t, per 1,000 homicide deaths, year t- 1.

B. Death sentences for murder, year t, per 1,000 homicide arrests, year t- 1.

Conclusions

The conclusions which can be drawn from the available evidence on the racial patterning of sentencing may be briefly summarized as follows:

(1) The death penalty has not generally been imposed for murder in a fashion discriminatory toward blacks, except in the South. Elsewhere, black homicide offenders have been less likely to receive a death sentence or be executed than whites.

(2) For the 11% of executions which have been imposed for rape, discrimination against black defendants who had raped white victims was substantial. Such discrimination was limited to the South and has disappeared because death sentences are no longer imposed for rape.

(3) Regarding noncapital sentencing, the evidence is largely contrary to a hypothesis of general or widespread overt discrimination against black defendants, although there is evidence of discrimination for a minority of specific jurisdictions, judges, crime types, etc.

(4) Although black offender-white victim crimes are generally punished more severely than crimes involving other racial combinations, the evidence indicates that-his is due to legally relevant factors related to such offenses, not the racial combination itself.

(5) There appears to be a general pattern of less severe punishment of crimes with black victims than those with white victims, especially in connection with imposition of the death penalty. In connection with noncapital sentencing, the evidence is too sparse to draw any firm conclusions.

None of these findings are inconsistent with the assertion of institutional racism or income discrimination in sentencing. It is quite possible that low income makes it more difficult to make bail, hire a private attorney genuinely independent of the court, etc., for both blacks and whites, and that these factors in turn result in more severe sentencing outcomes, as Lizotte’s (1978) research indicates-” If black criminal defendants are poorer than white criminal defendants, then income discrimination would produce racial differentials in sentences received. Nor are the data inconsistent with a hypothesis of overt discrimination at earlier stages of the criminal justice process. We might expect violations of stated values such as equal protection and justice for all to occur most commonly in connection with the least visible decisions, such as the decision to arrest, charge, prosecute, or release a defendant on bail (e.g., see Hagan, 1975 on the decision to charge). However, these decisions are less well studied than the sentencing decision, so the evidence for discrimination is necessarily even weaker than that regarding sentencing, quite apart from the actual prevalence of discriminatory practice.

The findings of this study do not suggest a different explanation for a well-known phenomenon. Rather they point to a phenomenon to be explained which differs from that conventionally addressed by American students of the legal reaction to crime and criminals. Students of the criminal justice system, concerned with the contemporary consequences of a historical pattern of racism, have sought to explain patterns of more severe treatment of blacks, while overlooking or downplaying  the pattern of more lenient treatment of black defendants.

Blacks in the United States, both in the recent and more remote past, have been less likely than whites to receive a death sentence if they committed a homicide. Furthermore, this pattern is apparently not entirely limited to the sentencing of capital offenders. For a variety of specific crimes, jurisdictions, and judges, various researchers have produced data indicating more lenient treatment of black defendants than whites, although the admittedly scattered findings were usually deemphasized or discounted as merely anomalous results attributable to some flaw in the analysis or research design.12 For example, Bullock (1961) found significantly shorter prison sentences were assigned to blacks convicted of murder; Levin’s (1972) Pittsburgh data indicate that blacks received more lenient dispositions than whites for eight out of nine offense categories; and Bernstein and her colleagues (1977) found that blacks received significantly less severe sentences than whites. Gibson (1978:469) studied sentences given by individual judges and found that seven of eleven judges gave a higher percentage of severe sentences to whites than to blacks.

” It is interesting that Lizotte’s path-analysis findings indicate that defendant’s race affects whether the defendant makes bail (which in turn affects sentence), but that it does not affect the bail amount set. This suggests that there is no overt racial discrimination in bail setting, but that there are income discriminations. Nice Lizotte had no measure of defendant’s income, it is possible that the race effect was found simply because the race variable was serving as a rough surrogate for defendant income.

12 This may be one of the more important subsidiary findings of the literature review. It is a chronic problem in this area, and perhaps in sociology as a whole, that researchers fail to recognize the significance of anomalies, which should alert them to the possible need for alterations in their fundamental assumptions rather than just their methods (See Kuhn, 1962: Ch. VI on this issue).

The specification of phenomena to be explained is in a way a more fundamental scientific task than the development of explanations, since the former obviously must occur before the latter can even be imagined. The pattern of lenient treatment of black defendants in the South was recognized in the 1940s and before by observers such as Dollard (1937) and Myrdal ([1944] 1972), and various explanations were developed to account for it. Today, however, this phenomenon is largely disregarded.

A number of factors which may help account for this pattern can be briefly outlined.

(1) Blacks as devalued crime victims. Perhaps the most plausible explanation of lenient treatment of black offenders who commit predominantly interracial crimes such as homicides, assaults, and rapes is that crimes with black victims are considered by predominantly white social control agents to be less serious offenses, representing less loss or threat to the community than crimes with white victims (Myrdal, [1944] 1972:551). Thus, paradoxically, racist sentiments would produce more favorable treatment for members of the subordinate racial group who commit interracial crimes.

(2) White paternalism. Students of criminal justice in the South have suggested a widespread view among whites of blacks as child-like creatures who were not as responsible for their actions as whites were, and who therefore could not be held accountable to the law to the extent that whites are (Dollard, 1937; Myrdal, [1944] 1972; Garfunkel, 1949). Therefore their perceived diminished responsibility presumably earned them more lenient sentences.

(3) Sociology-based tolerance. White paternalism may account for Southern sentencing patterns of the past but not patterns in the rest of the country in more recent times. However, it may have been replaced by a new form of white tolerance for black crime, involving the following line of reasoning: “Blacks commit crimes because of poverty, racism, and/or the resulting black poverty-subculture, which accepts or encourages criminal behavior. Their crimes are due to forces beyond their control or at least are to be expected in this light. Therefore blacks should not be held as responsible for their actions as whites.” Of course, this is largely speculative; however, criminal court informants questioned by Bernstein and her colleagues (1977:753) stated that “some judges and prosecutors assume that nonwhites commit crimes because the nonwhite subculture accepts such behavior. These subcultural differences are considered by the judges and prosecutors, thereby making the offenses of nonwhites seem less pernicious.”

(4) Affirmative action in the courts. White guilt over acknowledged past discrimination could motivate liberal criminal-justice decision makers to consciously or unconsciously compensate with more lenient treatment of black defendants.

(5) Compensation for institutional racism. Recognizing the handicaps of low income and greater prior criminal records which black defendants bring into court, some decision makers may attempt to compensate in determining sentence.

(6) Compensation for unconscious prejudice. Johnston et al. (1973) conducted a study involving criminal court judges sentencing hypothetical defendants and found that the hypothetical white “defendants” were sentenced more severely than the black “defendants.” Two of the judges who participated in the study explained that they consciously sought to compensate in their sentencing for any unconscious prejudice on their part against minorities (p. 870).

Various combinations of these explanations can be used to account for less severe sentencing of blacks when and where it has occurred. Factors (1) and (2) may be primarily responsible for lenient sentencing in interracial cases in the South in the 1940s and before, while different combinations of factors (3) through (6) account for leniency when it occurs elsewhere today and in the relatively recent past say, since the late 1960s. Only future research designed to test the hypotheses can determine which of these are more than merely plausible and actually produce the patterns observed.

The findings of this paper should not be interpreted as being incompatible with conflict, critical, or Marxist approaches to law, but rather only with the more simplistic, instrumentalist versions of these perspectives, which heavily stress the failure of the criminal justice system to operate according to its own stated standards of equity and proper procedure (e.g. Quinney, 1974; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971). In contrast, Beirne (1979) has pointed out the partial autonomy from particular social classes which the legal system enjoys, and has stated that “The capitalist class as a whole cannot be well served by frequent and visible abuses of due process” (p. 379). The criminal justice system can routinely operate to further legitimate the existing order through obedience to its own rules and limits to its power, even when overt class or race bias in specific situations would otherwise aid particular segments of the ruling class. Clearly then, a more intellectually mature version of conflict theory would not necessarily predict overt class or race bias in the allocation of penalties among criminal defendants.

However, there are forms of class bias in the legal systems which are not so clearly a threat to the legitimacy of the system. For example, the American legal system openly permits differing economic resources to be used in mounting a criminal defense, and such differences render legal advantages in avoiding conviction or obtaining lenient sentences if convicted, even though the advantages may operate indirectly and may involve no intentional prejudice on the part of any system decision maker. Lizotte (1978) has demonstrated how criminal sentence is affected by whether the defendant made bail and by the type of attorney the defendant had (private attorneys who were not courtroom regulars were more successful in negotiating light sentences than other types). While Lizotte had no measure of income, these are both clearly advantages more available to defendants with greater income. If equal protection of the law is a commodity which must be purchased, then this “equality” cannot be anything more than a legal fiction as long as the resources for such a purchase are distributed in an unequal fashion.

Serious though this economic or income discrimination in court processing may be, there is a far more fundamental bias in criminal sentencing. No studies of court processing of criminal defendants can address the issue of how legislatures criminalize behaviors common to lower-class persons, while either failing to criminalize or assigning slight penalties to equally harmful behaviors common among middle- or upper-class persons, such as poisoning of the air and water, manufacture of food, drugs, and other products harmful to human health, price-fixing, and consumer fraud. Detailed study of the use of wealth and power in controlling the ideological composition of legislatures and enforcement agencies, thereby influencing selection of behaviors to be criminalized, the original setting of penalty ranges, the determination of enforcement priorities, and allocation of enforcement resources, is likely to reveal far more about why blacks and lower-class persons are overrepresented in arrest, court, and prison data than studies of processing within the criminal justice system. The focus on the influence of ascribed characteristics of individual criminal defendants on processing decisions has, at least up to now, failed to yield the empirical support which would justify the attention that continues to be lavished on the subject.

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I’m Better Than You

When it all comes down to it everyone has their prefernces of what kind of person the or rather what ethnicity they like most. Racial relationships in the United States have been very strained dating back as far as the introduction of colonization. The question is now of course what make one race  or ethnicity better than another. In other words which race is infrior to whom? Is there a such thing as a “inferior” race? The common components of measuring one’s superiority within mainstream society are; how much capital do you possess, how connected are you socially to influectianl people and the amount of representation you have in the political realm. History tells us that whites within our nation as the majority, most socially and economically prosperous and most politaclly represented are the dominat race within America. Yet does this mean that all minorities are inferior them? How is supremacy among the remaining minorities determined? Who gets to make those determinations and what are thier basis behind them?

Since this nation begun as a nation founded by the “white man” for the “white man” the system that society functions in, is set up in a way that it only allwos a certain percent of  minorities to accumulate the type of wealth and social standing that their wwhite counterparts have. Even so there are still discrepansasies between the opportunites offered to whites compared to minorities in addtion to their methods of climbing the soical ladder. In essence relfecting back on the ideal that in the world of business and politics that “its not what you know, its who you know.” As a general rule most historians agree that the determination of race superiority as determined by whites in the 1700-1800s was based upon how dark the skin tone was. Native American as landowners were superior to slaves because they hand discovered how to work their land, as well as devolped their own separate systematic societies. They were seen as comparable to white men with brown skin. Slaves on the other hand weren’t seen as men and women in the general sence, first and foremost they were property, secondly they were black and gender came as a bargaining chip and deal breaker during most of the auctions. As property slaves weren’t an ctual part of society and although there was a free colored population during the slave era, these individuals were commonly the offspring of intra-racial marriages between blacks, whites, American Indians and individuals European descent.

Today of course race superiority is not strictly based on just the color skin, notions have supremact end to lean toward which nationality has been in America the longest. Most minorities view white as white, whether you have strong European ancestry or not, you are viewed as a white person based off the color of skin. It could be argued that American Indians should be the top group becasue they were the original residents of this nation, but due to all the factors that accounted for the millions of death within this group, American Indians now make up less than 1% of the Unisted States’ population, have little political representation, social standing, and exempting those who work in the casion business are considerable impoverished. Thus sicne they don’t have the necessary factors in order to be considered higher in position, they actually fall just below whites depending upon, the basis of capitol and skin color. African Americans who have had to travel mush further compared to American Indians up the social and economic ladder are only considered number two or three on the “superiority list” in terms of extnent of time in America. In terms of skin color they are second to last, Middle Eastern or Muslim being the last due to the events of 9/11 which fueled mass discrimination against hem. Latinos, which is considered an ethnicity and not a race can either be black or white and thus have more social standing than blacks which place them higher on the supremacy scale. Asains who have encountered vast amounts of economic wealth in this country have the capital, and social standings that place them underneath the Latino population but still before blacks on the ladder.

In truth I don’t view the “superiority list” as anything other than a marker for the type of racial constructions that the media, and culture have influenced. Race is really just a concept used by society to label the distinctions between people. By giving a person who looks a certain way a title in essence you have created an identity that is to be associated with that person, their children, grandchildren and anyone else has similarities with them. For example slanted eyes is considered to be a common trait among all Asain nationalites, thus if your white with slanted eyes, it can be assumed that you have Asian ancestry. I believe that the whites of the past created these titles for people who they felt did not share enough similarites with them or they considered to be lower grades of people compared to them (American Indians). They gave them these titles in order to ensure their dominace and taught them that “this was who you are.” Basically saying that you are not a man as I am, you are a Black man, and defining the difference between the two.

Racism versus Professionalism: Claim and Counter-Claims about Racial Profiling

Vic Satzewich and William Shaffir

Department of Sociology, McMaster University

Dans l’article, on parle du profilage racial que les policiers nient utiliser. D’apre`s des entrevues mene´es aupre`s des membres du service de police de Hamilton, on sugge`re que le concept d’une sous-culture policie`re offre la toile de fond la plus cre´dible pour comprendre ce qu’on appelle commune´ment le « profilage racial ». Vu de cette manie`re, le profilage racial est perc¸u par les agents de police comme un e´le´ment d’une se´rie d’activite´s qui de´finissent leur travail. Dans ce contexte, le profilage se produit meˆme sans les agents de police pouvant eˆtre favorables aux pre´juge´s et a` la discrimination contre les personnes de minorite´s visibles. De plus, cette sous-culture fournit aux services de police une technique de digression efficace et convaincante pour neutraliser les alle´gations selon lesquelles les institutions policie`res n’ont pas re´ussi a` e´liminer les pratiques racistes de leurs agents.

 

Mots cle´s: profilage racial, service de police, sous-culture policie`re, racisme

This paper examines the meaning of police denials of racial profiling. Based on interviews with members of Hamilton Police Service, we suggest that the concept of a police subculture offers the most credible backdrop for understanding what is commonly termed racial profiling. When contextualized in this manner, racial profiling is perceived by the police as one in a series of activities that define their work. We argue that, when seen in the context of police subcultures, such profiling occurs even in the absence of officers who may be inclined to prejudice or discrimination against members of visible minorities. As well, that subculture provides police with a powerful and convincing deflection rhetoric to neutralize claims that the policing institution has failed to root out the racist practices of its officers.

Keywords: racial profiling, policing, police subculture, racism

Introduction

Racial profiling occurs when law enforcement or security officials, consciously or unconsciously, subject individuals at any location to heightened scrutiny based solely or in part on race, ethnicity, Aboriginality, place of origin, ancestry, or religion, or on stereotypes associated with any of these factors, rather than on objectively reasonable grounds for suspecting that the individual is implicated in criminal activity (Tanovich 2006: 13). Operating as a system of surveillance and control, it ‘‘creates racial inequities by denying people of color privacy, identity, place, security, and control over their daily life’’

A number of recent commentaries on racial profiling in policing in Canada have suggested that there ought not be any further debate about whether racial profiling exists (see, e.g., Tator and Henry 2006). They argue that there is credible statistical evidence from police jurisdictions in the United States, Britain, and now Canada that points to the existence of racial profiling as a routine and regular part of policing (see, e.g., Ontario Human Rights Commission 2005; Wortley 2005). Even more pointedly, commentators argue that, even if there are lingering controversies and disagreements over the methods used to collect and interpret the statistical evidence that points to the existence of racial profiling (Wortley and Tanner 2003; Harvey 2003), there is a substantial weight of anecdotal evidence, coming from individuals with minority backgrounds, that a wide variety of institutions and organizations in Canada engage in racial and/or religious profiling (Ontario Human Rights Commission 2005). The argument is that, because many members of minority communities believe that racial profiling exists, this belief in itself is reason enough for the police and other institutional authorities to take the issue of racial profiling seriously and to take steps to curb its use as a policing strategy. A number of commentators have also noted that, generally speaking, police chiefs, police union representatives, and police boards deny that racial profiling is practiced in this country (Wortley and Tanner 2003; Henry and Tator 2006). These denials are explained either as a form of democratic racism (Henry and Tator 2006) or, from the vantage point of Howard S. Becker’s (1967) hierarchy of credibility, as outright lies told by those in power in order to protect their prestige and authority. In this paper, we want to suggest an alternative perspective on the issue of racial profiling. Rather than interpreting police denials of racial profiling as a form of democratic racism, or as lies, this paper suggests that the concept of a police subculture offers the most credible backdrop for understanding what is commonly termed racial profiling. When contextualized in this manner, racial profiling is perceived by the police as one in a series of activities that define their work. We argue that, when seen in the context of police subcultures, such profiling occurs even in the absence of officers who may be inclined to prejudice or discrimination against members of visible minorities. As well, that subculture provides police with a powerful and convincing deflection rhetoric to neutralize claims that the policing institution has failed to root out the racist practices of its officers. Indeed, as our data based on interviews with police officers suggest, police officials feel confident that the organization’s efforts to embrace diversity are to be applauded and that its critics should be condemned (Sykes and Matza 1957).

This paper is organized as follows. We begin by identifying some recent manifestations of racial profiling and attend to immediate reactions by the police. We then examine the claims advanced by the police we observed and the particular lens through which they evaluate the occurrence of profiling. In doing so, we examine the deflection rhetoric employed by the police to rationalize claims about their practices, rhetoric that serves to neutralize feelings of blame or guilt regarding the putative targeting of visible minorities. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, what critics label as racially motivated practices, police view as sound, work-related criminal profiling. We attend to their claims in some detail and identify several claims that are used to justify their contention that police activities reflect an underlying commitment to professional policing, without racial overtones. We observe that what police refer to as criminal profiling, which is viewed as necessary for efficient and professional policing, their critics identify as racial profiling. The social construction of the meaning of profiling reflects different perceptions of reality.

Racial profiling in Canada: The background

The allegation that the justice system in Canada treats individuals of minority background unfairly is not new (see, e.g., Backhouse 1999; Mosher 1998). A number of task force reports, commissions of inquiry, and scholarly research papers have suggested that minority groups are both under-policed when they are victims of crime and over-policed when they are seen as perpetrators of crime (see, e.g., Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1995; Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System 1995). More recently, public attention and academic debate have focused on racial profiling as a particularly pernicious example of the over-policing of Racism versus Professionalism: Claims about Racial Profiling 201 minorities, particularly among black and Aboriginal communities (Tator and Henry 2006; Tanovich 2006).

The evidence for racial profiling is based on two types of data (Wortley and McCalla 2007): statistical evidence, and perceptions and experiences of differential treatment owing to racialized features. In Canada, the statistical evidence in relation to racial profiling comes from two widely publicized and controversial studies. The first, conducted by the Toronto Star in 2002, showed that black Torontonians are over-represented in certain charge categories, that black people are treated more harshly than whites after they are arrested, and that black offenders are much more likely to be held in custody for bail hearings than their white counterparts (Rankin, Quinn, Shephard, Simmie, and Duncanson 2002). The Star contends that these patterns hold even after other relevant legal factors have been taken into account statistically (Rankin et al. 2002; Wortley and Tanner 2003: 1). In the subsequent public discussion of the Star’s findings, the over-representation of black people in certain charge categories was widely interpreted as evidence that the police practiced racial profiling.

The second study, which was conducted by University of Toronto criminologist Scot Wortley at the request of the chief of the Kingston, Ontario police force, found that black people were 4 times more likely to be pulled over by police and that Aboriginal residents were 1.4 times more likely to be pulled over by police than were white residents of Kingston. The study also found that 40% of black males between the ages of 15 and 24 were stopped by police during the study year compared to 11% of their white counterparts, and that about 10% of stops involving a black person resulted in an arrest or charge compared to 6% of stops involving whites (Wortley 2005).

Another research strategy is to ask minority groups about their experiences with and perceptions of the justice system and about whether they felt they were being treated fairly by the police, judges, crown attorneys, and other authorities (Wortley 1996; Wortley and Kellough 2004; Wortley and Tanner 2003; see also Solomon and Palmer 2004). In one of its surveys, the 1995 Commission on Systemic Racism in the Ontario Criminal Justice System found, for example, that 43% of black male residents of Toronto, but only 25% of white male residents and 19% of Chinese male residents, reported being stopped by police in the previous two years. It also found that ‘‘there were widespread perceptions among Black, Chinese and White Torontonians that judges discrimination the basis of race’’ (1998: 178). A 2000 survey of Toronto 202 Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice April 2009high school students revealed that black students who were not involved in criminal, deviant, or other activities that would attract police attention were nevertheless 4 times more likely to report being stopped and 6 times more likely to report being searched than were similarly situated white students (Wortley and Tanner 2005). The Ontario Human Rights Commission (2005) invited testimonials and submissions from individuals and organizations that had been affected by racial profiling. Their report focused on the social, economic, and psychological costs and consequences of racial profiling for individuals, families, and communities in Ontario and made a series of recommendations to address racial profiling in a variety of organizations (Ontario Human Rights Commission 2005: 1–4). In 2003, 36 black police officers were asked to recount their lived experiences with having been the subjects of racial profiling, and a majority indicated that they had been stopped and questioned by other police officers ‘‘for no other reason than the color of their skin’’ (Tanovich 2006: 1–2).

David Tanovich’s (2006) The Colour of Justice provides a comprehensive analysis and summary of what is known about racial profiling in Canada. Tanovich outlines the extent and scope of profiling based on race but also skillfully presents its nuanced character, which, in his view, obscures its total impact. Maintaining that the color of justice in Canada is white, Tanovich (2006: 1) contends, ‘‘If you are not White, you face a much greater risk of attracting the attention of law enforcement officials in public spaces such as the highway, street, border, or airport.’’ Tanovich offers two salient points. The first is that, as his numerous examples show, this increased surveillance is due, not to the behavior of particular individuals, but to their appearance; the second is that the day-to-day racial profiling that occurs is primarily about stereotyping rather than about the expression of overt racism. Phrased differently, in the case of the police, officers focus on those components of the profile corresponding to pre-existing assumptions and organize their behavior accordingly. Far from diminishing in prevalence, the areas where racial profiling intrudes in Canadian society are, in fact, expanding.

The public responses to this research and to the various task force and commission reports have been, in some ways, predictable. Many individuals of minority background argue that the research simply confirms what they have known all along; namely, that they are unfairly stereotyped, profiled, and targeted by police because of their ethnicity (Tator and Henry 2006: 151–183). On the other hand, many individuals associated with the police, including chiefs of police, police unions, and police boards, deny that the police engage in racial profiling (see Henry and Tator 2006: 157–158). In the context of the Toronto Star controversy, then chief Julian Fantino is quoted as saying, ‘‘We do not do racial profiling. We do not deal with people on the basis of their ethnicity, their race or any other factor. We’re not perfect people but you are barking up the wrong tree’’ (’’There is no racial profiling’’ 2002). Chief Fantino and members of the Toronto Police Services Board further argued that the data analysis was flawed and that ‘‘statistics can be used to prove anything’’ (Wortley and Tanner 2003). Even though Chief William Closs of the Kingston Police force tearfully apologized to Kingston’s black and aboriginal populations immediately following the release of Wortley’s research (2005), he did not go so far as to admit that the Kingston police systematically and intentionally engaged in racial profiling (Farmer 2005).

What are we to make of what Wortley and Tanner (2003) describe in this context as ‘‘data, denials and confusion’’? Frances Henry and Carol Tator (2006; see also Tator and Henry 2006) suggest that the refusal to admit to the reality of racism is in fact a form of racism. They argue that Canadians are prone to a peculiarly Canadian form of racism; namely democratic racism. In their view, democratic racism is

an ideology in which two conflicting sets of values are made congruent to each other. Commitments to democratic principles such as justice, equality, and fairness conflict but coexist with attitudes and behaviors that include negative feelings about minority groups, differential treatment, and discrimination against them (Henry and Tator 2006: 22)

One of the ways that democratic racism is expressed in Canadian society is through the use of what Henry and Tator (2006) call ‘‘discourses of denial.’’ These discourses of denial are the bundles of ‘‘myths, explanations, codes of meaning and rationalizations’’ (Henry and Tator 2006: 21) that have the effect of undermining and explaining away the seriousness of racism in the country.

They identify a number of discourses of denial, including the discourse of color blindness, the discourse of equal opportunity, the discourse of blaming the victim, and the discourse of multiculturalism. For example, the discourse of color blindness, which involves white people’s insisting that they do not notice the color of a person’s skin when they make decisions, is a form of racism because it involves ‘‘a refusal to recognize that race is part of the ‘baggage’ that people of color carry with them, and [a] refusal to recognize that race is part of the everyday values, policies, programs, and practices’’ of Canadian society (Henry and Tator 2006: 24).  These kinds of denials are, in their view, ‘‘a dominant discursive theme within mainstream culture and [are] reflected in the everyday discourses of individuals and institutions’’ (Henry and Tator 2006: 24). Police and other institutional authorities’ denial of racial profiling amounts to a variant of the discourse of denial and reflects the racist nature of Canadian society (see also Tator and Henry 2006).

Another explanation for police denials of racial profiling is rooted, paradoxically, in the attempts of the police to behave in a responsible manner. We may profitably draw upon Becker’s (1967) seminal article with reference to the biases that are inherent in all forms of research. Becker convincingly argues that responsible officials level accusations of bias precisely because they are accountable. They are the ones, Becker asserts, who have been entrusted with the care and operation of our important institutions; for example, schools, law enforcement, hospitals. By virtue of their official position, they are the ones who are expected to ensure that matters within the institution unfold as they should. But because institutions are refractory and fail to perform as society would like them to, officials often have to offer images of competence and responsibility despite knowledge to the contrary. As a result, ‘‘officials develop ways both of denying the failure of the institution to perform as it should and explaining those failures which cannot be hidden’’ (Becker 1967: 243).

We are uncomfortable with both of these explanations of police perspectives on racial profiling. Henry and Tator’s (2006) definition of racism is too broad and encompasses too wide a variety of individual and institutional actions and beliefs. Further, if we accept their definition, motives are seen as irrelevant to the analysis of racism. In other words, in their conceptualization, it makes little difference whether someone denies that racial profiling is a problem because she or he believes that the evidence is flawed or denies that racial profiling is a problem because she or he thinks certain groups are culturally or genetically predisposed to criminal behavior and deserve to be targeted by police. In Henry and Tator’s view, both denials are racist. Becker’s (1967) approach, on the other hand, while appealing, is too categorical and insufficiently recognizes that competing definitions of the situation may both be correct.

The Date

This study began as part of a larger, more diffuse project whose goal was to examine the organization of the Hamilton Police Service and its response to ethnic and racial diversity issues since the early 1990s. In light of the prominence of racial profiling in both the local and national press when we initiated the project, our attraction to the matter of racial profiling and the Hamilton Police Service seemed reasonable.

Our introduction to the police was mediated through a high-ranking officer – an acquaintance of one of the authors – who, when informed of our larger research interests, offered to serve as our unofficial sponsor (Lofland and Lofland 1995). Impressed, we believe, by our offer to listen to the police ‘‘tell their side of the story,’’ coupled with an approach that did not presume the police to be guilty of racial profiling as charged by the media and others, he facilitated access to the highest echelons of the police force.

As researchers studying the police discover, the organization mirrors the military in terms of its formal structure and command chain (Tator and Henry 2006: 101). Access to it, and to its members, can be secured only through the consent of its official gatekeepers. Moreover, police officials are likely to err on the side of caution before permitting researchers to engage members of the force in conversation and observe how police work is actually accomplished.

The data for the paper were gathered over a two-year period (2003–2005) and consisted of informal conversations with police officers in the Hamilton Police Service. After we had secured the consent of the chief of the Police Service to conduct interviews with officers, the chief and others in positions of management played no role in the selection or screening of individuals who we interviewed.3 We used a snowball sample and began by interviewing a senior officer who had served many years in the service.4 After each interview, we asked, ‘‘Who are some people might consider approaching?’’ We invited 21 officers for an interview. One officer declined the offer, and in two cases, competing schedules made it impossible to arrange an appropriate interview time. In total, we conducted 18 such conversations with police officers: 16 officers were male and 2 were female, 9 officers were from various minority backgrounds and 9 were white. The majority of the conversations were recorded, and all of these were transcribed. We met with some police at their headquarters, as this proved most convenient for them, though the majority of the conversations were conducted at a coffee shop or restaurant. The informality of these conversations meant that there was no set interview guide, but their content and structure, though highly varied, were unified by an underlying theme.

Learning the ropes: The occupational culture

Arguably, symbolic interactionists’ main achievement in sociology lies in the analysis of socialization. Emphasizing the development of the person in interaction with outside influences, symbolic interactionists have analyzed the situational learning of neophytes as they begin their training and work (Haas 1974; Haas and Shaffir 1987). Socialization inevitably involves contacts with the existing occupational culture. Neophytes typically adopt this culture through a process of ongoing negotiation and accommodation. As part of this process, they familiarize themselves with a range of acceptable justifications and explanations to defend their work-related activities (Shaffir and Kleinknecht 2005); moreover, they adopt the image and approach to self-justification that belong to the occupational culture (Becker, Geer, and Hughes 1968; Van Maanen 1984).

Sociologists in this tradition have been particularly attentive to the development of subcultures for demarcating boundaries that separate insiders from outsiders. Focusing on the relevance of occupational subcultures, interactionists have analyzed how subcultures enable participants to develop unique perspectives, identities, and relationships (Prus 1997). As this literature reveals, occupational subcultures are commonly characterized by an ideology that provides participants with a definition of their work and its significance. ‘‘Some,’’ writes Berger ‘‘involve no more than a few simple propositions expressing the viewpoint of the occupation. Others involve highly elaborate intellectual constructions, sometimes blossoming forth into a full-blown theory of society’’ (1964: 234–235). Each construction serves to proclaim the occupation’s legitimacy.

Socialization unfolds as neophytes learn the necessary skills and behavior, at least minimally internalizing them and acquiring or even glorifying the identity associated with the occupation (Becker and Carper 1956; Zuckerman 1977). The process involves mastering not only certain skills but also a related set of implicit, Racism versus Professionalism: Claims about Racial Profiling 207 often taken-for-granted qualities that neophytes must display to be accepted into the fraternity of occupational peers. Indeed, every occupation has some costume, jargon, or set of tools that its members are expected to adopt. But occupations demand more. While involving the acquisition of techniques for performing tasks, occupational socialization also concerns ‘‘taking over specific standards, beliefs, and moral concerns’’ (Fine 1985: 5).

An underlying theme in this literature centers on how someone’s work affects her or his view of the world (Hughes 1958). Shaped by their occupational subculture, all occupational groups – including, for example, doctors, janitors, prostitutes, priests, and physicians – develop distinctive ways of responding to their surroundings. The police are no exception. Even though there may be internal differentiations within an overall police subculture (Chan 1997), police subculture is defined by a distinctive set of norms and values (Crank 1997; York 1994; Tator and Henry 2006). As they share common training, neophyte officers learn to respond in predictable ways to similar situations. As are others, the police subculture is characterized by a distinctive ideology – shared beliefs about how work is to be done and how to evaluate the kinds of people with whom police typically interact. Novices entering this subculture are presented with a fait accompli – norms and values to which they are expected to conform. As Desroches (1992) observes:

From association with fellow officers and being sensitive to their attitudes and beliefs, the new recruit soon picks up on the group’s general opinions about most police matters . . . The desire to perform well on the job, become promoted, and achieve status in the eyes of one’s peers leads the young officer to conform to established norms. The views and expectations of senior officers cannot be disregarded or dismissed by the recruit. It is not long therefore before these rookie police officers become socialized into the ideology of their peers. (46)

In his analysis of the police, Skolnick (1967) zeroes in on elements in the police milieu – danger, authority, and efficiency – that combine to yield a distinctive cognitive lens and behavioral practices or, in his words, a ‘‘working personality.’’ He maintains that, owing to their social situation, the police tend to ‘‘develop ways of looking at the world distinctive to themselves, cognitive lenses through which to see situations and events’’ (Skolnick 1967: 42). The element of danger makes the police officer particularly attentive to signs indicating a potential for violence and law-breaking, influencing her or him to become a ‘‘suspicious’’ person. Since police work requires the officer to be occupied continually with the potential for violence and danger, he or she ‘‘develops a perceptual shorthand to identify certain kinds of people as symbolic assailants, that is, as persons who use gestures, language, and attire that the policeman has come to recognize as a prelude to violence’’ (Skolnick 1967: 45; Tator and

Henry 2006). According to this view, the police officer responds to the indication of danger suggested by appearance. Socialization into the police subculture necessarily involves being trained to be suspicious, to be attuned to events and changes in the physical surroundings indicating the possibility of disorder. Such ‘‘suspiciousness’’ does not depend on whether the officer ‘‘has personally undergone an experience that could objectively be defined as hazardous’’ (Skolnick 1967: 48).

From the perspective of the police with whom we met, police work necessarily involves attentiveness to particular signals and ‘‘unusual fits.’’ It is precisely in this regard that profiling occupies center stage in accomplishing police work. It is not difficult to appreciate how behavior defined as racial profiling by police critics is otherwise defined as criminal profiling and professional conduct by members of the Hamilton Police Service. In the following passage, a high-ranking officer emphasizes the importance of context for how police organize their activities and points out that, by failing to appreciate the total dynamics of police work, one can mistakenly conclude that blacks are singled out for differential treatment:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they did that [profiling]. Now, mind you, I don’t work in the Jane–Finch area. I mean ask anybody about Jane–Finch and, all of a sudden, they begin to shudder . . .I know that because that’s a reputation that has spread right across the map of Ontario . . . assaults, muggings, shootings, drugs, stabbings . . . they’re all happening in Jane and Finch. So let’s just pretend that that population there is mostly a black or immigrant population . . . certainly not typical white. And if that’s where the crime is, I’m going to be pulling over people who do crime. It’s like going fishing. You go where the fish are if you’re going to catch fish. If you’re going to catch criminals, you end up having to do that . . .”

A veteran of the services, himself a member of an ethnic minority, makes a similar point. Following specialized training, police work Racism versus Professionalism: Claims about Racial Profiling 209 depends on profiling, but not the kind that is specifically linked to any particular race or culture:

“As police officers, we are trained in certain ways, and then you build instincts. Because when we’re out on the street, we rely on our instincts. We are trained investigators in the sense that we need to do profiling. And what kind of profiling is that? Criminal profiling. It has nothing to do with racial profiling . . . We profile criminals. We do geographic profiling. It assists us to identify our problems and localize them and address them. When we go out . . . we do not target any specific culture or race. However, if we do come into a problematic area, and we start to ply our trade – policing – then if they happen to fall within those parameters, there’s not much we can do.”

Another black officer sensitive to the claims made by critics of the police that racial profiling is endemic to policing underscores the necessity of distinguishing between profiling, in general, and racial profiling more specifically:

“We talk about racial profiling in our office, and with our officers, and we say to a certain extent profiling exists in policing and you need it to some extent, but you have to recognize you can’t label everyone, you know. You can say that I find stolen autos on the east mountain, for example, OK, so are you saying that all people that live on the east mountain steal cars? That’s not a realistic a + b = c knowledge . . . If I want to go look for stolen cars, ya, I might go look toward the east mountain. But it doesn’t mean that’s always the case and all people on the east mountain steal cars . . . A certain amount of profiling does exist in policing. It has to exist.”

More generally, however, police situate profiling within the broader context of police work that can only be appreciated at a distance by the larger public. Referring to the responsibilities faced by the police, a minority officer reflects:

“It’s a very difficult job, and the nature of the job forces you to stereotype and discriminate. When I’m driving my cruiser at 2 o’clock in the morning, and I see . . . [one of the interviewers] in a shirt and tie driving a Mercedes, I think nothing of it. But if I was to see a black twenty-year-old, guess what? He’s getting pulled over.”

The following excerpt emphasizes that race is but one component taken into consideration as police piece together various features comprising a ‘‘scene’’ to determine whether it is sufficiently unusual to merit their intervention:

“Some people seem to think that race is a dominating factor in the way the police do their job; that is, there’s a black guy walking down the street. I’m going to stop him, maybe he’s a drug dealer or something. [Right.] Whereas race is really one of several factors that the police will look at. Like, for instance, you might see a black guy walking down the street. He might be wearing a certain style of clothes, baggy clothes, hip-hop type clothes. [Right.] He might have a red bandana which is often worn by gang members. He might meet up with another guy. You might see them kind of make a hand slide to each other . . . You might see the one guy reach out, they quickly exchange something hand-to-hand. You look at all those factors. The conclusion the police officer is going to come to is a drug deal just went down. Looking at all those factors employed, the hand-to-hand, the hand slides, but when you approach that person, well [he will claim], they’re just busting my ass cause I’m black.”

In addition to offering a lens through which to view the unique challenges of their work, the occupational culture enables the police to draw upon a vocabulary of explanations, what Mills (1940) called motives. This vocabulary is composed of a series of rationalizations and accounts (Scott and Lyman 1968) police (in this instance) use to explain their situation to themselves and others. Many such police rationalizations permit them to deny responsibility when faced with the allegation that their profiling is racially motivated.

This type of rationalization, according to Sykes and Matza (1957), offers a more credible explanation than race-driven motives – one that more accurately reflects practical considerations and provides them with a way of viewing their own actions as ‘‘normal,’’ in line with what would be expected of them. Such tactics, then, not only explain an event but also enable officers to save face by deflecting possible feelings of guilt or shame in connection with their interactions with minorities. In their analysis of the accounts employed by defeated politicians to manage the stigma of defeat and to cope with the repercussions of loss, Shaffir and Kleinknecht (2005) refer to such coping mechanisms as deflection rhetoric, a term that suits our purpose in understanding how the police attend to the charges against them of being racially motivated.

Deflection strategies, discourses of denial, and alternative perspectives

We have identified three general ways that police officers neutralize and deflect allegations that they, or their colleagues, engage in racial profiling. We term these, the intolerance of intolerance, the discourse of multiculturalism, and the discourse of blaming the victim. Notably, these deflection strategies are used by both minority and non-minority officers.

The intolerance of intolerance

Many of the police officers we interviewed make use of a deflection strategy that refers to a general climate within police services that is intolerant of intolerance. This involves denying the existence of racial profiling by referring to recent changes in organizational structures that reflect the police’s commitment to diversity, tolerance, and fairness. These deflections are made in the context of contrasts with the past: while there was racism within police services in the past, they claim that racism is no longer part of the present-day structure of the organization. One black officer contrasted her own reception into the police force years ago with how new recruits are received at present:

“Back then, there were still a few crotchety old officers who did look at, you know, younger recruits, like he got hired because he’s black or something like that . . . I’ve seen the older guys that kind of hated me because their white male friends were trying to get on and I was there and they thought that I was hired for this, and for this, and for this. I don’t see that anymore.”

Further, police officers referred us to a number of specific initiatives and structures that were indicative of the organization’s commitment to tolerance and diversity and its commitment to intolerance of prejudiced or discriminatory behaviour. Not surprisingly, among the senior officers we interviewed, several made reference to Hamilton Police Service Mission Statement, which is ‘‘to serve and protect in partnership with our communities,’’ and one of its core values, which is ‘‘the respect for, value and equitable treatment of all individuals in our diverse community’’ (Hamilton Police Service n.d.). As one senior officer explained:

“I think that when we look at, you know, we have our values of fair and equitable treatment of all people from our diverse communities. Awareness that our organization is a lot more diverse than it ever was when I started, that we try and instill these values in our officers and make sure that they live the values . . .

Chan (1997; and see Tator and Henry 2006) notes that there is often a disjunction between the culture of police management and the culture of the everyday officer on the street. In our research, we found that, in relation to the cultural construction of profiling, there was a consistency between the two levels of police culture. Police management and senior and junior front-line officers all noted that valuing diversity is a serious part of the yearly performance appraisal of officers. Valuing diversity is one of the ten core competencies used in the yearly performance appraisals of constables, detective constables, sergeants, and detectives. Within each core competency, individual officers are assessed on a number of specific expectations and are evaluated as either needing improvement, meeting the expectation, or exceeding the expectation. These core competencies, one senior officer explained, are also assessed in promotion decisions. In describing the changes that the organization has undergone, another senior officer explained that when the notion of core competencies, such as valuing diversity, was introduced a few years earlier, few officers knew what police management were looking for:

“One year they were promoted for all of the old reasons and all of a sudden they changed the rules. So we were testing them on their ability to match the competencies of the new program. And a lot of them hadn’t a clue what we were talking about because they didn’t understand . . . what we were after.

In describing the new method of assessing core competencies such as valuing diversity, this officer explained that the organization was searching for behaviours and not simply the correct, textbook answer. In his words:

“We were asking questions. If you hear something being said on a parade, was one of the questions, that was derogatory, or negative, or whatever, what have you done? Or if some officers are talking about something, what have you done? Or if you are a sergeant and one of your officers comes to you and says another sergeant, a female officer comes to you ‘cause this has happened. Another sergeant is trying to have a relationship with her, what have you done?”

One mid-ranking officer noted, ‘‘[B]ecause of the fact that it now forms part of the promotional standards, most of the less tolerant people have been leaving out of the system.’’ Even junior level officers suggested that this is a serious commitment; that valuing diversity is taken as seriously in promotions as other aspects of the competencies. A number of officers also explained that the organization takes seriously racially and sexually based incidents that are internal to the force, such as racial jokes, harassment, and inappropriate inter-officer racial comments. A senior officer remarked:

“[W]e expect that when you hear some derogatory talk in the parade room, or some rumours or some shitty stuff going down, you’ve gotta take action. I mean we tell them in several ways. One is when we hear about it, we make sure we discipline them . . . You don’t have to hit everybody. You just gotta make sure that they know what’s going on.”

Another officer noted that senior officers ‘‘nip in the bud’’ incidents of harassment and discrimination. A senior black officer recounted:

“I had an officer come to me and say, I was in the exercise room and I heard two officers talking to each other, one said something about arresting a nigger. Now the officer that heard it was a sergeant, and he addressed it. In fact, he made the officer come and meet with me. And again, I try not to make a big issue out of it. I just wanted to talk to him and try to make him understand why . . . without threatening him or charges . . .”

Those officers who are ambitious and interested in moving through the ranks are aware that having an incident of prejudiced or discriminatory behaviour on one’s record can be fatal to the promotion process. As one mid-ranking officer explained, even if the issue is resolved informally, ‘‘it will still reflect in that person’s yearly performance appraisal or something at the end of the year. That will stay with you, even though when you think it’s informally resolved and it will hang on to you.

The multicultural society deflection

A related rhetoric points to the claim that the police could not possibly engage in racial profiling because their recruitment mechanisms are better than they were in the past, and they are now more attuned to diversity. Several officers also pointed out that there is greater variety in the backgrounds of new recruits, including higher levels of education and ‘‘life experience,’’ which means that they do not have some of the qualities of officers recruited in the past. One senior, white, male officer explained, ‘‘When I was recruited in the early seventies, I was recruited because I was a big lump. I was a big guy. I’m sorry, but I know how to handle myself and that was important in those days . . .The standing joke [was] if you’re a hockey player . . .’’ The officerexplained:

That doesn’t happen any more. We’re recruiting people from a variety of ages and backgrounds, you know, and we see people that are in their thirties, and the odd person that is in their forties that will come on the police service. And I think that will bring a lot of life experience . . . We like to bring young kids in, but at the same time, it’s nice to have someone who has the life experience.

This kind of contrast with the past was noted repeatedly in our conversations. A female officer explained:

I do see an improvement with the younger people. I do, ‘cause I think the younger recruits, as opposed to twenty, twenty-five years ago where you finished high school, and you walked across the street to the police station and got hired. I think the recruits are older and are college and university educated.

The police officers we spoke to also suggested that recruiting and pre-service training mechanisms are more rigorous now than they were in the past and that more attention is paid to weeding out the new recruits who might become the proverbial ‘‘bad apples’’ once they start working in policing. For example:

Actually, when I was up there, a guy got fired for that. He was very, um, he was racist towards people verbally and they picked up on it and they interviewed certain people and they dismissed him because of it. They could tell that he was just upset that certain people were there. He thought other people were hired because of what they looked like or female or male, or you know what I mean. If you’re in the gay/lesbian community, something like that, they think oh you’ll get hired right away. Some people still have that outlook.

Officers also point to the wider multicultural nature of Canadian and southern Ontario society – that younger recruits have been raised in a multicultural environment and have gone to school with other students of diverse backgrounds. Changes in the overall social environment are used as evidence that police officers are now, more than ever, attuned to living in a multicultural society and more aware of and sensitive towards diversity and tolerance-related issues. This wider multicultural context is used to explain away racism, particularly among newer recruits to the police. Since they have been raised in a multicultural environment, the new recruits are seen as less prone to racism and as more familiar with issues of cultural and racial diversity. For example:

You’re getting a varied background, a diverse background . . .We’re getting people coming through now in their twenties who have grown up in a multicultural society. They’ve gone to school with kids who are black, Asian, so forth. They’ve gone to college with these kids. They’ve gone to university. So now they’re coming in and they’re becoming young officers on our job, and they will not accept a racist training officer, if you will, saying, ‘‘These people are this, these people are that.’’

According to this officer, the new recruits not only come with more experiences relating to diversity, they are not willing to tolerate racist attitudes within the police force:

That recruit officer now has the strength and power to say, you know what, that thinking is wrong. There’s this board, there’s this [structure] in the world behind me that says it’s wrong, and I’m going to challenge you and I’ll do something about it. They’re not gonna sit back and allow a racist officer to carry on.

A black officer recounted an experience where, during a discussion of serious crime among thirty officers in a parade room at the station, an officer blurted out ‘‘[W]e’re gonna catch them soon, those bloody niggers.’’ The black officer explained:

“As soon as he said it, it was like you know, silence for a second, then you kinda carried on. But I spoke to him afterwards, or he approached me afterwards, and I could tell he felt really bad about it. It was just something that, you could tell that he didn’t mean to say, and I’ve never seen any kind of racist behaviour before.”

Blaming the victim

Yet a different deflection strategy used by police to explain away allegations of racial profiling involves turning the tables and suggesting that, if there is a problem, the problem lies elsewhere, particularly in the individuals and organizations who claim that racial profiling is a problem (Tator and Henry, 2006: 132).

As a number of other students of police subcultures have noted, the police subculture is characterized by a ‘‘we’’/’’they’’ mentality (Manning 1977; Westley 1970). The construction of non-police as others is augmented by the belief that it is the other that holds racist attitudes towards the police. Both of these themes were evident in the following explanation by one black officer of how the police are the true victims of racism:

When you get a call and you’re a black person or a white person, Vietnamese or whatever you are, you get called a pig just the same, you know? You might get called something else pig, in front of that or whatever, but you get that from different groups of people. Like black people have called me that . . . So depending what they think what type of nationality you are, they call you that, people in the community; but they’re upset, tensions are high – but I think when we all put the uniform on, we’re all looked at like police officers.

This officer went on to explain, ‘‘[W]hen you put on the uniform, you’re all blue.’’

Several officers, both black and white, recounted specific situations where individuals of minority backgrounds played the so-called ‘‘race card’’ against the police to deflect attention away from their own wrong-doing. As one female Aboriginal officer told us:

I remember one specific incident and I stopped the person like 250 metres away. I can’t see who’s driving 250 metres away. I can see the car . . . The driver’s black, [and] right off the bat start off, ‘‘[Y]ou stopped me because I was black.’’ I said, ‘‘[W]hat? From 250 metres away, I couldn’t see if you were pink from 250 metres away.’’

In a related way, some of the officers we interviewed suggest that individuals who make claims about racial profiling do not fully understand the complexity of police work and that allegations of racial profiling are too often formed on the basis of watching American television. American TV, as one officer explained, offers a simplistic and inaccurate interpretive lens through which to view policing in Canada:

I find that a lot of people that had opinions like that, when I go to the black community meetings, things like that, they’ve never really called the police. They watch TV, and they see how the police are, you know, treating other people in Los Angeles or New York . . . They’ve never really had a police officer come to their house for anything. They just have their own minds made up until they actually deal with you. Then they say, ‘‘Oh I didn’t know that police were like a regular person.’’

Some officers claim that individuals who make allegations of racialprofiling, or who believe that racial profiling is widespread, are simply invoking the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles. As one black officer explained:

Again, the kinds of people that you’re dealing with, when you’re dealing with the criminal who happens to be an ethnic minority, they may throw race at you. And it’s not that police are racist, it’s just the nature of our job that you have to deal with people in acertain way, and it comes across that way. I mean, if a black guy breaks into a house and comes running out, and there’s three white police officers there, and that black guy doesn’t wanna go to jail, he’s gonna fight his way to get free no matter what. People who are gonna watch this only are gonna be thinking of one thing – of Rodney King, and look at these racist cops, beating up this black guy. Meanwhile, if it was a white guy and this white guy decides he’s not going to jail and he’s gonna fight no matter what, the same thing’s gonna happen.

Clearly, the deflection strategy of blaming the victim, where the police are portrayed as the true victims of racism, is to attribute allegations of racial profiling to the uninformed and misinformed public who have little direct experience of policing or police work.

Conclusion

Prus (1997) defines a subculture as ‘‘a set of interactionally linked people characterized by some sense of distinctiveness . . . within the broader community’’ (41). He further indicates that ‘‘subcultures typically develop around some form of activity, but imply reflectivity, interaction and continuity over time’’ (41). Some of the main features characterizing a subculture include an ideology or perspective that is shared by members of the community, common patterns of activity distinguishing insiders from outsiders, a common and unique language shared by members of the community, and commonly understood norms that are reflected in practice.

To the degree that the subculture is either viewed, or views itself, as separated from the mainstream, it more successfully retains distinctive boundaries and affects the members’ patterns of behaviour. Subcultures can be conceptualized along an insulation continuum, ranging from active efforts to maintain total insulation from the surrounding culture to passive attempts at identity maintenance.

In this regard, the police subculture is somewhat of an anomaly. Its demands on its members are not omnivorous, as the ‘‘greedy institutions’’ described by Coser (1974) are wont to be, which ‘‘seek exclusive and undivided loyalty [from] those they wish to encompass within their boundaries’’(4). So, while police are subjected to intensive socialization as they both seek to acquire and are exposed to the occupation’s culture, the parameters of this transformation are not as rigidly defined as those described and analysed by Goffman (1961) in his seminal work on total institutions. Thus, for example, police officers are not restricted to friendships with fellow officers, and they are free to partake in all aspects of cultural life. And, in the process, they are in a position to discover how their work, whether patrolling or profiling, for example, is assessed by their critics. And yet, much like the process identified by Davis (1968), who used the term doctrinal conversion to describe the moral and symbolic transformation as a lay person acquires the status ‘‘professed’’ by the professional, neophyte police recruits are exposed to a time-honoured police culture that quickly acquaints them with and reinforces their behaviour towards the ranking of minorities and towards the question of how minorities are to be considered in relation to police work. In due course, the wellsocialized member of this subculture is able to emphasize the distinction between criminal and racial profiling.

Our analysis of racial profiling and the police subculture raises wider questions about how to define and analyse racism and how to deal with racism and racial profiling. According to Henry and Tator, racism in Canada is not necessarily determined by, or even related to, intentions and motives. In light of their definition of racism, all those actions and behaviours that intentionally and unintentionally deny the equality of black and other minority communities are racist, regardless of motive. Racism is about consequences, independent of motive. Police, on the other hand, arguably approach the issue of racism through the lens of motive. That is, they tend to view racism through the lens of

personal responsibility and look at the legal architecture of motive and degree of culpability to determine criminal responsibility. Differing approaches to how racism in Canadian society should be defined strike at the heart of the controversy about the nature and extent of racial profiling in Canada. They also strike at the heart of solutions to the problem of racism and racial profiling. It is important to know whether discrimination and social exclusion are driven by intentions and by beliefs that certain groups of people are inferior to others or whether discrimination is the unintentional outcome of taken-forgranted processes followed by, or decisions made by, individuals who do not hold beliefs about the superiority or inferiority of certain groups of people (Miles 1989: 60). In other words, if we want to seek an appropriate solution to the problem of racial profiling, we need to have a clear assessment of the source of the problem.

A key to unravelling the puzzle of the police force’s reliance on racial profiling ties this issue to professionalism and police work. Policing, maintain the police, requires a level of conduct that cannot be undermined by concerns that minorities, or any interest group for that matter, may cry foul or be identified as victims of unfair targeting. From the perspective of the police, while particular groups may garner attention, this is hardly the outcome of racialized police practices; they engage in criminal profiling, not racial profiling.

Notes

1. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper and the University of Calgary Gorbachev Foundation for its support of this project.

2. Each and every officer to whom we spoke was informed directly of our interest in racial profiling and in no way did we mask or obfuscate our interests. It is the case that our broader interest in this project centred on matters of ethnic and racial diversity and policing, but everyone was informed that the specific topic we wished to discuss was the officer’s take on racial profiling.

3. It is important to emphasize that in no way was police management involved in the selection of respondents. As part of our interest in matters of diversity, and how the Hamilton Police Service had been transformed along this line, it seemed reasonable to meet with minority officers to appreciate their perspectives on recent changes.

4. Since we were engaged in a study relying on qualitative research methods, it was less important to ensure that we had gathered a representative sample of police officers (Berg 2007). However, the nature of our sample may have something to do with the rather conservative replies elicited from our respondents. As one of the anonymous reviewers indicated, citing Tanovich’s results with black Toronto police officers, the perspectives of the officers involved in our study appeared much more conservative than those arising from similar interviews with officers from other police departments. The reviewer wrote, ‘‘Most of these officers were of the opinion that racial profiling is a major problem and often related their own stories of being victims of racial profiling activity.’’ The question the reviewer posed was, Why were the Hamilton results so different? We can, at best, speculate to explain this difference in response. As police officers often reminded us during our conversations, while the activity is similarly labelled, policing work is actually experienced and practised differently across varied urban settings. Hamilton, police emphasized, is not Toronto. The police force is considerably smaller, and the city does not include sizeable pockets populated by minorities. A significant outcome of this difference in size is that it is more likely for Hamilton police officers to recognize one another in contexts outside of police work. To phrase the matter differently, since police officers in Hamilton are less likely to retain their anonymity, it follows that instances of minority officers’ being victimized by racial profiling may be greatly reduced.

5. One additional source of data was ride-alongs we did with the police, where we accompanied officers during their patrols and viewed first-hand how decisions were reached to target a particular vehicle. As these excursions were limited, we place less confidence in these data than in those derived from the informal conversations.

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RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN CRIMINAL SENTENCING:A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE EVIDENCE WITH ADDTIONAL EVEIDENCE ON THE DEATH PENALTY

GARY KLECK

Florida State University

Reevaluation of published research on racial bias in criminal sentencing and of data on execution rates by race from 1930 to 1967 and on death-sentencing rates from 1967 to 1978 indicates that, except in the South, black homicide offenders have been less likely than whites to receive a death sentence or be executed. For the 11% of executions imposed for rape, discrimination against black defendants who had raped white victims was substantial, but only in the South. Evidence for noncapital sentencing also largely contradicts a hypothesis of overt discrimination against black defendants. Although black offender-white victim crimes are generally punished more severely than crimes involving other racial combinations, this appears to be due to legally relevant factors related to such offenses. Crimes with black victims, however, are less likely than those with white victims to result in imposition of the death penalty. The devalued status of black crime victims is one of several hypothetical explanations of the more lenient sentencing of black defendants.

The legitimacy of the legal systems of modern democracies depends heavily on the degree to which the systems operate in a manner consistent with their own stated procedural standards of justice. It has been argued that Western societies, including the United States, are undergoing a “legitimation crisis” and that this is occurring specifically in criminal justice systems at least partly because they fail to live up to their stated commitments to treatment of defendants without regard to ascribed personal characteristics such as race, ethnicity, and gender or partially ascribed characteristics such as status or class position (Quinney, 1974; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971).’

It is widely believed, and frequently stated, that the criminal justice system has been in the past, and remains, racially discriminatory (e.g., Sutherland and Cressey, 1970; Clark, 1970). The most frequently cited category of evidence for this assertion has been research indicating more severe sentencing of black criminal defendants than white defendants, especially in imposition of the death penalty. As there have been at least sixty empirical studies of adult criminal sentencing published which refer to race, it is not surprising that at least one critic of the criminal justice system has asserted that evidence on racial discrimination in sentencing is probably the strongest evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system (Over by, 1971:575). Because the outcomes of sentencing decisions are among the most visible of legal processing, the legal system’s claim to legitimacy is especially dependent on the public’s perception of the pattern of such outcomes. Therefore, it seems particularly important to take a close look at evidence bearing on this issue.

The first part of this paper attempts a comprehensive assessment of the published scholarly empirical research on racial bias in criminal sentencing in the U.S. in connection with both capital punishment and noncapital sentencing. One of the principal sources of distortion regarding this issue in the past has been selective citation of studies supporting one position or another; therefore, great care has been I As used in this paper the word “race” is socially defined, referring to “a human group that defines itself and/or is defined by other groups as different from other groups by virtue of innate and immutable physical characteristics” (van den Berghe, 1967:9). taken to be as exhaustive as possible in finding relevant studies. The second part of the paper presents new evidence on race and capital punishment, consisting of an analysis of execution rates for blacks and whites over the period 1930 to 1967, for the United States as a whole and for the South, and of death-sentencing rates for the period from 1967 to 1978.

The Varieties of Racial Bias: Some Conceptual Distinctions

At least five different practices can produce racial differentials in criminal sentences which are likely to be viewed as illegitimate or unjust.

(/) Overt racial discrimination against minority defendants. This refers to the imposition of more severe dispositions on members of a subordinate racial group, independent of their legally relevant individual merits, and primarily as a direct result of the conscious or unconscious racial prejudice of the sentencing decision makers.

(2) Disregard for minority crime victims. This would include the failure to sentence offenders (of any race) who victimize minority-group members as severely as those who victimize nonminority-group members.

(3) Class discrimination. This refers to more severe treatment of lower-class defendants as a consequence of class prejudice. It may be due to hostility or indifference of middle-class decision makers toward culturally different defendants, or because lower-class defendants better fit popular stereotypes of serious or dangerous criminals. Because blacks in. the United States are disproportionately members of the lower class, class discrimination would affect them more heavily than whites, independent of any overt racial discrimination. This assumes that among the set of criminal defendants blacks are more likely to be lower class than whites, a debatable assumption considering the overwhelmingly lower-class character of criminal defendants of all races.

(4) Economic discrimination. When a society’s legal system is structured so that significant private economic resources are required in order to effectively obtain full legal protection, this constitutes economic discrimination, even where there is no class discrimination (as defined above). If low-income defendants receive more severe sentences than middle-income defendants because they cannot afford to hire an outside private attorney or cannot make bail, this constitutes economic discrimination and could produce racial differentials in sentencing outcomes.

(5) Institutional Racism. This refers to the application, possibly in a universalistic fashion, of decision making standards which in themselves have considerable consensual support (possibly even among minority members) but which result in less favorable outcomes for minority defendants. As used in the past, the term seems to have referred to, among other things, practices (2) through (4); but institutional racism in sentencing can take other forms as well. For example, if racial-minority defendants are likelier to have prior criminal convictions, then the use of prior record as a criterion for sentence determination will tend to produce less favorable outcomes for minority defendants and would therefore be an instance of institutional racism (for this view, see Burke and Turk, 1975, or Farrell and Swigert, 1978a). The establishment, by legislatures, of higher statutory penalties for crimes committed more frequently by racial minority members than by others (such as violent interpersonal crimes) would also constitute institutional racism, regardless of the behavior of judges, prosecutors, and others who influence sentencing outcomes.

For the sake of verbal and conceptual clarity, it is misleading to label either (3) or (4) ” racial” bias or discrimination. Although clearly unjust and certainly related to race in the United States, these practices are not directly racial in themselves, since they affect whites as well as blacks and could occur in jurisdictions or societies where no racial distinctions of any sort were made. Therefore, although reference will be made to them in examining the evidence regarding overt racial discrimination, these practices are not themselves primary objects of the analysis.

The concept of institutional racism is highly problematical. It is so flexible that any practice producing unfavorable sentencing outcomes for racial-minority members can be characterized as racist, no matter how the outcomes were produced, whether they were intentionally sought, and regardless of what criteria were involved in the decisions producing the outcomes. Any pattern of sentencing involving the crimes commonly dealt with by U.S. criminal courts could be construed as institutional racism, since blacks commit a disproportionate share of such crimes relative to their share of the population (see Hindelang, 1978, for a thorough discussion of the evidence for this statement) and therefore are bound to receive a disproportionate share of the criminal punishment, no matter how fairly the sentencing process is administered. Only an alteration of the social conditions producing differentials in the racial distribution of criminal behavior or a radical redefinition of which crimes the courts focus on could eliminate institutional racism of this sort. For these reasons, neither this study nor any other study of sentencing per se could reject the hypothesis of institutional racism in sentencing. Consequently, attention in this analysis will be primarily focused on overt racial discrimination and secondarily on disregard for minority crime victims.

ASSESSMENT OF PRIOR RESEARCH

This review is intended to be an exhaustive assessment of all scholarly empirical studies of race and criminal sentencing of adults in the United States published up through 1979. It does not cover the few studies relating ethnicity and sentencing, such as Castberg (1971) or Hall and Simkus (1975), nor studies of conviction, as opposed to sentencing, such as Forslund (1969). It does cover studies of the determination of degree of homicide of which defendants were convicted, such as Farrell and Swigert (1978a; 1978b), since such a determination is tantamount to determination of sentence. Also included are studies of commutations of death sentences, as these have commonly been cited as sentencing studies.

When two or more studies of the same data set, using very similar methods, have been published, only one is included, or the studies are treated as a single study (e.g., Wolfgang and Riedel, 1973 and 1975; Farrell and Swigert, 1978a and 1978b, and Swigert and Farrell, 1977; Lotz and Hewitt, 1977 and Hewitt, 1976). Studies of juvenile court dispositions are excluded since, properly speaking, juveniles are not sentenced to criminal penalties and determination of disposition is in any case substantially different from the adult sentencing process.2 Further, the following kinds of studies are excluded: anecdotal or journalistic accounts, case studies, hypothetical-case sentencing studies (e.g., Johnston et al., 1973), purely theoretical studies, and other reviews of the literature. The review also ignores studies such as those of Sellin (1928, 1935) which simply compare sentence lengths of persons sentenced or executed, without any comparison to numbers arrested, convicted, etc. Finally, unpublished studies such as dissertations are excluded because the availability of such material is limited.

Studies which fit the selection criteria were located through an iterative search process. An initial list of relevant studies was compiled through a search of Sociological Abstracts, Crime and Delinquency Abstracts, Legal Abstracts, and Hagan’s (1974) bibliography. (About one-third of the studies reviewed here were also included in Hagan’s review.)

2 Liska and Tausig (1979) reviewed eight studies which examined race and juvenile court dispositions, noting that five of them show a significant race effect in the conventionally expected direction. However, only two of the five simultaneously controlled for offense seriousness and prior record. The crude state of research in this field is also indicated by the almost complete absence of attention to controlling for effects of juveniles’ family circumstances or disposition. Although the philosophy of the juvenile court explicitly defines family stability as a legitimate factor to be considered, Liska and Tausig do not say a word suggesting that racial differences in family intactness could account for differences in juvenile court dispositions. 3 However, for a sampling of recent doctoral dissertation on the subject the reader may consult Dison (1976), Hutner (1977), and San Marco (1979). A reading of their abstracts indicates findings highly congruent with the conclusion of my review

Then the references listed in each of these studies were examined for further relevant studies, and so on, until no further leads were uncovered.

Capital Punishment Sentencing Studies

Table 1 summarizes in compact form the prior scholarly empirical research on racial discrimination and use of the death penalty, first regarding murder and then rape. The last column indicates whether racial differences were statistically significant and in the predicted direction. In a minority of studies my assessment of the evidence presented in a study differs from that of the authors. Two examples of this are noteworthy.

Bedau (1964) concluded that there was racial bias in the final disposition of persons sentenced to death, despite his own acknowledgment that his data showed no significant relationship between race and final disposition, and despite the fact that the observed relationship was in the opposite direction to that indicating discrimination against nonwhites. In New Jersey 66.2% of nonwhites sentenced to die were executed, compared to 68.4% of whites (Bedau, 1964:19). Further, Bedau claimed there was no significant relationship between race and execution when felony and non-felony murders were separated, but reanalysis of his data reveals that in fact nonwhite murderers were significantly less likely to be executed for felony killings than were white felony murderers (X2 = 8.114, 1 degree of freedom, p = .01). There was no race difference for non felony killings.

Bowers (1974:81-107) claimed to have found evidence which pointed “unmistakably to a pattern of racial discrimination in the administration of capital punishment in America” (p. 10). His conclusion was not limited to the South or to use of the death penalty for rape, although he laid particular stress on these areas. Regarding racial bias in use of the death penalty for murder, the evidence that Bowers produced was of two kinds: he argued first that the lower mean age at execution of nonwhites compared to whites was evidence of racial discrimination, and, second, that the lower percentage of cases appealed by nonwhites compared to whites indicated discrimination. While Bowers acknowledged that the age differentials at execution may simply reflect age differences at commission of the offense and arrest, he argued that the difference at arrest was not as large as that at execution. In fact, there was a 2.4 year difference in mean age at execution in Bowers’ data (p. 80), while Wolfgang’s (1958:70) homicide arrest data indicate an almost identical 2.3 year difference in the median age of black and white male homicide arrestees. Regarding the data on appeals, racial differentials in percentage receiving appeals of death sentences for murder since 1940 are largely confined to the South (see especially Bowers’ Table 3-9), consistent with our interpretation of the findings of previous death-penalty discrimination studies. Nevertheless, Bowers concludes that, as indicated by age differentials at execution and differentials in percentage receiving higher appeals, ” racial discrimination in northern and western states began to rival that in the South, at least for the period of decline in capital punishment” (1974:104).

Probably the most serious shortcoming of death-penalty discrimination studies is that they nearly all fail to control for prior criminal record. The one study which introduced such a control, Judson et al. (1969), found no evidence of racial discrimination, suggesting that apparent racial differences in other studies may actually have been due to racial differences in prior criminal activity. This hypothesis is supported by Wolfgang’s (1958:175-6) findings that black homicide offenders were significantly more likely to have previous criminal arrest records than white homicide offenders. It is further supported by Hagan’s (1974:366-8) reanalysis of Nagel (1969), which indicated that where crude controls for prior record (record/no record) were introduced, racial effects shrank. Where more adequate controls for prior record (number of prior convictions) were introduced, the racial difference disappeared altogether (Judson et al., 1969:1366-76), suggesting that the dichotomous measure of prior record may be inadequate for control purposes (see also Green, 1961:11 on this point).

All of the studies purporting to find racial bias in use of the death penalty for murder failed to control for income, class, or occupation of the defendants.4 However, the most methodologically sophisticated study of the subject, which did control for defendant’s occupation, found no racial effect on whether or not a death sentence was imposed for murder by California penalty juries (Judson et al., 1969:1366-76). Further, they found no relationship between the victim/offender racial relationship and sentence imposed, suggesting that the findings of Johnson (1941) and Garfunkel (1949) may have reflected regional and temporal peculiarities characteristic of North Carolina (or more generally, the South) in the 1930s and earlier.

Several points should be noted about the pattern of findings on discrimination in use of the death penalty for murder. First, every single study consistently indicating discrimination towards blacks was based on older data from Southern states, and three of these four studies were based on overlapping data from North Carolina. Second, all of the studies finding discrimination in administration of capital punishment for murder were not in fact studies of sentencing, although most of them have been cited in the research literature as if they were. Mangum (1940), Johnson (1957), Wolfgang et al. (1962), and Bridge and Mosure (1961) all studied commutation of death sentences, not sentencing itself, while Bowers’ (1974) data largely concerned appeals of death sentences. Third, all of these studies failed to control for prior criminal record of the defendant, for the defendant’s class or income, or for the distinction between felony and non felony killings. Since studies which do introduce such controls find that they reduce the sentencing differentials between blacks and whites (Green, 1961; Judson et al., 1969; Nagel, 1969), even in the South the racial differential may have been due to differences in criminal record, income, or type of homicide committed rather than discrimination. The evidence considered as a whole indicates no racial discrimination in use of the death penalty for murder outside the South, and even for the South empirical support for the discrimination hypothesis is weak.

Regarding the use of capital punishment for rape, the evidence strongly suggests overt discrimination against black defendants. Four of the studies of this issue found evidence of discrimination, while the relationship between race and the carrying out of the death sentence (as opposed to commutation of the sentence) was not significant in the Johnson (1957) study, according to Hagan’s (1964:370) reanalysis. The relationships found in the other four studies (Johnson, 1970; Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Partington, 1965; Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973, 1975) are very strong, and the evidence indicates that the death penalty for rape was largely used for punishing blacks who had raped whites. Although all of these studies were methodologically crude, it is doubtful if additional controls could eliminate the huge racial differentials in use of the death penalty. The importance of this conclusion, however, is limited by several facts. First, the death penalty has rarely been used to punish rape. Only 11.8% of the executions from 1930 to the present were for rape. Virtually all the rest were for murder. Second, the use of the death penalty for rapes has always been, at least since national data on executions were first gathered in 1930, strictly a peculiarity of the South. Not a single execution for rape occurred outside the South or the border states during that period (U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1970). Third, the imposition of death sentences for rape has virtually disappeared. Of the 183 persons who were sentenced to death during 1978, only one was sentenced for rape (U.S. NCJISS, 1979:25). Thus, the rape discrimination conclusion is of historical significance with regard to capital punishment in the South, but has limited relevance to current debates over capital punishment, especially since the United 4Although both Wolfgang et al. (1962) and Johnson (1957) had data on occupation of offenders as well as race, they did not attempt to simultaneously control for race and occupation. No explanation of this conspicuous omission was offered in either study. States Supreme Court declared, in Coker vs. Georgia (1977), that the use of the death penalty for the rape of an adult woman was a disproportionate penalty and therefore unconstitutional (U.S. NCJISS, 1979:2).

Noncapital Punishment Sentencing

Studies summarizes the empirical research on sentencing involving penalties other than the death penalty. The results of each study are simply summarized in the last column of the table (“Discrimination?”), with each study characterized as to whether its findings largely supported a discrimination hypothesis (indicated by “Yes”), were mostly inconsistent with such a hypothesis (“No”), or were only partially consistent with the hypothesis (“Mixed”). Mixed findings most frequently occurred when more than one crime was studied, when sentencing patterns of a number of judges were reviewed, or when more than one measure of sentencing outcome was examined.

Studies were classified, in somewhat arbitrary fashion, according to what proportion of their findings were in favor of the discrimination hypothesis. They were characterized as mixed if from one-third to one-half (inclusive) of the findings favored the discrimination hypothesis and as favorable to the hypothesis if more than one-half of the findings favored it. For example, if a study examined eight different offenses, it would be labeled “Yes” if evidence of bias against black defendants was found for four or more offenses, as “Mixed” if such evidence was found for three of the offenses, and as “No” if two or fewer offenses showed such evidence. Since it could -be argued that evidence of discrimination even for one crime or sentence-outcome measure out of many is evidence worth taking very seriously, readers must judge for themselves the significance of the “mixed” findings.

Under the heading “Sentencing Measure” in Table 2, the dependent variable in each study is noted. The term “disposition” indicates that the dependent variable distinguished between categories like probation, jail sentence, prison sentence, etc., while “sentence severity” denotes a single scale of severity of disposition or sentence constructed by the researcher. The other terms are self-explanatory.

Table 2 also indicates whether the authors of these studies in any way controlled for the type of criminal offense involved. In those studies where only one type of crime was involved, or where several very similar offenses were studied, such a control was obviously unnecessary. However, where several different offense types were lumped together, as in Cargan and Coates (1974) or Pope (1975a), differences in sentence received by black and white defendants could be at least partly attributable to differences in the seriousness of the types of offenses for which they were prosecuted.

Of the 40 studies listed in Table 2, only eight consistently support the racial discrimination hypothesis, while 12 are mixed and the remaining 20 produced evidence consistently contrary to the hypothesis. Since a study’s findings were characterized as mixed even if as few as a third of them favored the discrimination hypothesis, this means that a substantial majority of all of the findings of these 40 studies contradicted the hypothesis.

However, the evidence for the hypothesis is even weaker than these numbers suggest, since of the minority of studies which produced findings apparently in support of the hypothesis, most either failed completely to control for prior criminal record of the defendant, or did so using the crudest possible measure of prior record-a simple dichotomy distinguishing defendants with some record from those without one. This is probably the most important flaw in studies drawing a conclusion of racial discrimination, 5 Use of these standards occasionally resulted in characterizations of findings which differed from those of the original authors (e.g., Bedau, 1964). Since I attempted to accurately reflect the studies’ theoretical or ideological preferences, when the original authors’ conclusions did not seem congruent with their data, their conclusions were discounted. Skeptical readers are encouraged to examine the original studies in order to judge for. Themselves the accuracy of my characterizations. It, NJ since the most methodologically sophisticated sentencing studies have consistently shown various measures of prior record to be either the strongest predictor, or among the strongest predictors, of sentences received (Chiricos and Waldo, 1975; Bernstein et al., 1977; Lotz and Hewitt, 1977; Lizotte, 1978). It appears to be the case that the more adequate the control for prior record, the less likely it is that a study will produce findings supporting a discrimination hypothesis.

Table 3 summarizes the whole body of prior research on race and sentencing, both capital and noncapital. Simply adding up the number of studies favoring or not favoring the discrimination hypothesis could be somewhat misleading, since some studies are clearly better than other s and should therefore be weighted more heavily than others in assessing the body of evidence as a whole. Therefore, although it would be difficult to assign exact weights, some simple quality distinctions can be made, such as distinguishing between studies which control for prior criminal record and studies which do not. Regarding noncapital punishment, Table 3 makes clear the importance of such controls-one-third of the studies without a control for prior criminal record support a discrimination conclusion, while less than a tenth of those with such controls support a discrimination conclusion. Regarding capital punishment, separate tallies of studies with and without such controls are unnecessary, since only one study, that of Judson and his colleagues (1969), controlled for prior record, finding no evidence of racial discrimination either in the sentencing of black defendants in general or in sentencing of those who had victimized whites.

Interracial Relationship of Offender and Victim

It has long been argued that racial bias in sentencing is not to be detected only by looking at the race of the defendant, but by noting the racial relationship of the offender and the victim (e.g., Johnson, 1941). Specifically, it is asserted that crimes involving black offenders and white victims are punished more severely than crimes involving the other three racial combinations, either because crimes involving black victims are taken less seriously or because the crossing of racial lines in the commission of a crime is taken very seriously (Johnson, 1941; Garfunkel, 1949). While black offender-white victim crimes, especially homicides and rapes, are punished more severely than crimes with other racial combinations, it is unclear whether this is due to the racial character of the crime, or to related, confounding factors. Black offender-white victim killings are more likely than other killings to involve an offender and a victim who are strangers to each other, and such killings are much more severely punished regardless of the races involved (Lundsgaarde, 1977:232). Such killings are also more likely to be committed in connection with some other felony, like robbery. Data in Block and Zimring (1973:8) indicate that for Chicago homicides in 1970, 38% of killings with black offenders and white victims were robbery killings, while only 5% of the white offender-white victim killings were robbery killings. Felony killings are punished more severely than other homicides, regardless of races involved (Wolfgang et al., 1962; Bedau, 1964; Wolf, 1964). Finally, black-white killings are less likely than black-black killings to be victim precipitated, and victim-precipitated killings in turn are less likely to be premeditated (Wolfgang, 1958), leading one to expect less severe punishment of black on black killings for this reason, rather than the racial relationship per se. Eleven studies have examined sentencing outcomes by racial combination, and of these, seven (Johnson, 1941; Garfunkel, 1949; Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Howard, 1967; Southern Regional Council, 1969; Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973; Zimring et al., 1976) found more severe punishment for black-white offenses.6 However, none of these studies controlled for the possibly confounding factors we have mentioned. The only four studies which did introduce such controls (Green, 1964; Judson et al., 1969; Farrell and Swigert, 1978b; Myers, 1979) all found no evidence of such sentencing patterns. Thus, consideration of the pattern of findings as a whole strongly suggests that the interracial relationship itself does not affect the sentencing decision, except in connection with the punishment of rape in the South (Florida Civil Liberties Union, 1964; Howard, 1967; and Wolfgang and Reidel, 1973, 1975 support this limited assertion of discrimination).

Table 3. Summary of Prior Research

Results:

Yes Mixed No Total

Capital Sentencing

All Studies 7 4 6 17

Murder 3 4 5 12

Rape 4 0 1 5

Noncapital Sentencing

All Studies 8 12 20 40

Control for prior record 2 8 13 23

No control for prior record 6 4 7 17

NOTE: See the discussion of prior literature in the text for an explanation of the classification of studies by their results.

Examination of prior studies on the question of racial discrimination and use of the death penalty for murder has suggested that many of their conclusions may be seriously time-bound and regionbound. Their findings may not be generalizable to areas outside the South, considering the generally contrary findings of studies of non-Southern jurisdictions using more recent data. Given these considerations, it would seem reasonable to study national sentencing practices, making regional comparisons, using data covering as long a period of time as possible.

EXECUTION RATES AND DEATH SENTENCING BY RACE

It has been claimed that “racial discrimination is strongly suggested by the national execution figures” (NAACP, 1971: 51-2). Clearly, blacks have been executed in numbers far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. Over the period 1930-1976, 53.6% of all legally executed persons in the United States were black, although blacks constituted only about 10-11% of the U.S. population during that period (U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1971:8; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1977:25). This disproportion, however, cannot in itself be taken as evidence of racial discrimination, since blacks also commit a large proportion of U.S. homicides, the crime most frequently punished by death. A more meaningful measure of capital punishment sentencing outcome would be an indicator of execution risk, i.e., an execution rate. A true rate compares a number of events (such as executions) with the number of times the event could have occurred. Therefore, the ideal base for the execution rate could be the number of persons convicted of a capital offense, i.e., a crime for which, in a given jurisdiction, the offender could be sentenced to death. However, there are no national data on the number of such crimes committed or on persons arrested for the crimes. Therefore, a surrogate measure is needed.

In this analysis, execution risk by race is measured as the number of executions (for murder) of persons of a given race in a given year, divided by the number of homicide victims of that race who died in the previous year. The number of homicide victims of a given race is used as an approximation of the number of persons of that race who committed a homicide, whether a capital murder or a noncapital murder.7 Since 92-97% of all homicides involve killers and victims of the same race (Garfunkel, 1949:371; Harlan, 1950:745; Wolfgang, 1958:379; Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:51; U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1977:9), the racial distribution of homicide victims can be used to describe the racial distribution of homicide offenders with very little error (Wolfgang, 1958:223).

6 Although Bullock (1961) has been cited in connection with the issue of sentencing and interracial relationships (e.g., Hindelang, 1969 and Baab and Ferguson, 1968), his study did not actually contain any data on victim-offender racial relationships.

7 Execution rates for rape cannot be computed because there are no comparable data to use for the base of the rate. There were no national data on rape victimizations by race up until 1973 (by which time the judicial moratorium on execution had begun and even the imposition of death sentences for rape had virtually disappeared). In any case, the evidence showing discrimination in capital punishment of rape is fairly conclusive, making the computation of such rates redundant.

Since there is a median lag between arrest and a court trial for criminal homicide of slightly under six months (Wolfgang, 1958:296, 299), and a mean lag of about one year between conviction and execution (Lunden, 1962:1043; McCafferty, 1967:95; U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 1970), the appropriate comparison for our purposes is between the executions in year t and arrests in year t- 1, or possibly year t-2. For the sake of simplicity, the execution rates assume a one-year lag between commission of the homicide and execution of the offender over the time period studied. In any case, the results assuming a two-year lag would be substantively identical.

Table 4 presents the computed execution rates for blacks and whites, covering the entire period for which national execution data is available, 1930-1967.8 In the final column, a ratio greater than one indicates a black execution rate higher than the white execution rate; therefore, for 25 of 38 of the years examined, the black execution rate was lower than the white execution rate. Since they are based on fairly small numbers of executions, race specific execution rates and ratios of execution rates are somewhat unstable for single years, especially for the later years in the time series. Therefore the rates for the entire period were computed. For the period 1930-1967 there were 1,663 executions of whites for murder and 1,638 executions of blacks, while for the period 1929-1966 (lagged one year behind the other period) there were 159,482 white homicide victims and 168,518 black homicide victims (and presumably roughly equal numbers of homicide offenders). Therefore, the white execution rate for the entire period was 10.428 executions per 1,000 homicides and the black rate was 9.720 executions per 1,000 homicides. Thus, over the entire period, blacks were subject to a lower execution risk than whites.

Given the regional pattern of discrimination findings of previous studies of capital punishment sentencing, it may be the case that execution rates are higher for blacks than for whites in the South and that this fact is obscured in national data. It is also possible that the relative execution risks of blacks and whites changes over time and by region. These possibilities are addressed using the data in Table 5.

These data indicate that the execution risk of black homicide offenders (actually nonwhites in this analysis) has indeed been greater than that of white homicide offenders in the South, while the opposite has been true in the rest of the United States. However, the excess of the black execution risk over the white execution risk in the South has declined over time, to the point where execution rates were roughly equal in the period since 1950. The evidence, considered in combination with prior research on capital punishment sentencing outcomes, suggests that use of the death penalty is not inevitably or inherently discriminatory, but rather that racial discrimination in its administration has been highly variable over time and between regions. These data support the racial discrimination hypothesis in connection with death penalty sentencing only for the South. Of particular interest is the somewhat surprising finding that in the recent past, outside of the South, the white execution risk has been substantially higher than the nonwhite risk, a fact which apparently has gone unnoticed in the literature. Possible explanations of this phenomenon will be discussed later in the paper.

8 The number of homicide victims of each race excludes executions and killings committed by policemen in the line of duty. Executions are excluded because it is undesirable to have a common component in the numerator and denominator of the execution rate. Police killings are excluded because they are nearly always considered justifiable homicides and therefore not criminal. These exclusions make the homicide victim figures somewhat better surrogates for figures on criminal homicide offenders.

9 It is debatable whether statistical tests of significance are appropriate where population data are involved, although Blalock (1972:238-9) has argued that they can serve to rule out an alternative explanation of a set of results-that the data could have been generated by chance processes rather than causal ones. A two-sample test of the difference between the proportions of persons executed among blacks and whites indicates the difference is significant at the .05 level (two-tailed test, Z=2.03).

Table 4. Execution Rates by Race, 1930-1967

Black-Black, White-White, Black-White Ratio of Black Executions Homicide Executions Homicide Execution  to White

Year for Murder Victims a for Murder Victims a Rate B Rate C Execution Rates

1967 1 1 – 0.168 0.191 0.880

1966 0 5,945 1 5,230 0.000 0.205 0.000

1965 1 5,408 6 4,879 0.203 1.336 0.152

1964 4 4,926 5 4,492 0.893 1.197 0.748

1963 6 4,478 12 4,176 1.375 2.918 0.471

1962 15 4,364 26 4,112 3.583 6.468 0.554

1961 15 4,187 18 4.020 3.568 4.688 0.761

1960 26 4,204 18 3,840 6.394 4.826 1.325

1959 26 4,066 15 3,730 6.619 4.260 1.554

1958 20 3,928 20 3,521 5.040 6.073 0.839

1957 22 3,968 32 3,293 5.479 9.718 0.564

1956 31 4,015 20 3,239 8.105 6.240 1.299

1955 24 3,825 41 3,205 5.954 12.387 0.481

1954 33 4,031 37 3,310 8.317 11.315 0.735

1953 25 3,968 25 3,270 5.840 7.492 0.779

1952 36 4,281 35 3,337 9.217 10.965 0.841

1951 31 3,906 55 3,192 7.463 16.965 0.456

1950 32 4,154 36 3,362 7.402 9.882 0.749

1949 56 4,323 49 3,643 12.216 12.626 0.967

1948 61 4,584 32 3,880 13.475 8.095 1.664

1947 89 4,527 40 3,953 18.924 10.005 1.891

1946 61 4,703 45 3,998 15.877 12.879 1.233

1945 52 3,842 37 3,494 14.790 12.445 1.188

1944 48 3,516 45 2,973 13.829 14.227 0.972

1943 63 3,471 54 3,163 14.593 16.162 0.903

1942 58 4,317 57 3,341 13.075 16.681 0.784

1941 46 4,436 55 3,417 10.426 14.773 0.706

1940 61 4,412 44 3,723 13.610 11.429 1.191

1939 63 4,482 79 3,850 14.338 18.283 0.784

1938 63 4,394 89 4,321 13.011 20.408 0.638

1937 62 4,842 67 4,361 12.086 13.405 0.902

1936 93 5,130 86 4,998 18.383 15.826 1.162

1935 66 5,059 115 5,434 12.028 18.338 0.656

1934 89 5,487 64 6,271 17:056 9.672 1.763

1933 74 5,218 75 6,617 16.122 12.093 1.333

1932 63 4,590 62 6,202 13.322 10.003 1.332

1931 57 4,749 76 6,198 12.800 12.722 1.006

1930 57 4,453 90 5,974 13.106 16.474 0.796

1929 4,349 5,463

SOURCEU:. S., Federal Bureau of Prisons, National Prisoner Statistics, Bulletin No. 46 (1971),p . 8; U.S., National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the U.S.: Mortality, (annual issues, 1937-1966); U.S.

Bureau of the Census, Mortality Statistics, (annual issues, 1929-1936).

NOTE: There were no executions in the U.S., 1968-1976; complete execution figures by race for the U.S. before 1930a re not available. Mortality figures for 1929-1932 refer to the death registration area rather  than the entire U.S. (95.7% of the U.S. population was covered in 1929; 96.3% was covered in 1932). In 1929-1932 black homicide victim figures were estimated from “colored” homicide figures; the difference is very slight.

a. Excluding executions and killings by policemen in the line of duty for 1950-1967. Figures before 1950 exclude executions but include killings by police.

b Black execution rate is number of black executions in year t per 1,000 black homicide victims in year t-1.

C White execution rate is number of white executions in year t per 1,000 white homicide victims in year t-1.

Possible Biases in Computation of Execution Risk Our estimates of execution risk by race could be biased if the homicides which blacks commit are less likely to be capital murders than those committed by whites. If this were true, using the number of homicide victims of each race as the base of the execution rate would be misleading for comparative purposes, since a smaller proportion of the black offenders could be a In regional and state breakdowns of mortality by cause of death, the data refer only to white/ nonwhite, while the published accumulations for the United States refer to white, black, and other races. considered to be at risk of execution, compared to white offenders. In this case, the black execution would be understated relative to the white rate.

Table 5. Execution Rates for Groups of Years by

Region and Race

United States

Black Rate/ Years White Black and  White Rate

1930-1939 14.38 14.24 0.99

1940-1949 12.80 14.07 1.10

1950-1967 5.94 4.57 0.77

1930-1967 10.43 9.72 0.93

Nonwhite Rate/ White Nonwhite a White Rate South

1930-1939 11.01 f4.41 1.31

1940-1949 11i24 14.26 1.27

1950-1967 5.02 5.30 1.06

1930-1967 8.39 10.47 1.25

Non-South

1930-1939 15.08 12.56 0.83

1940-1949 13.61 13.78 1.01

1950-1967 6.11 3.34 0.55

1930-1967 11.00 9.32 0.85

Three studies report figures on the percentage of criminal homicides designated as first degree (capital) murders, by race. One found the percentage designated first degree murder, both at indictment and at conviction, to be higher for blacks than for whites (Garfunkel, 1949:372), and one found the opposite (Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:43, 45, 88), while the third study found no significant difference (Wolfgang, 1958:302-03). Thus, no consistent relationship was found between race and proportion of criminal homicides designated first degree murder.

However, it has been argued that the designation of degree of homicide could itself be racially biased (Garfunkel, 1949). Would there be a racial difference if the degree of homicide were designated without bias? Given the hypothetical nature of the question, this is not easy to answer directly; however, we can evaluate it indirectly. It is generally agreed that there are a number of factors which can legitimately affect the designation of degree, including whether or not the homicide was committed in connection with another felony (called “felony killings”), whether the killing involved excessive violence or brutality, and of course whether or not the crime seemed to be premeditated. There is no direct evidence on premeditation by race. Wolfgang’s (1958:376) data indicate that a higher proportion of killings committed by whites are committed in connection with robberies than are killings by blacks, suggesting that a higher proportion of white killings might be felony killings, compared to killings by blacks. However, the difference is slight, and this finding has not been corroborated elsewhere. On the other hand, Wolfgang (1958) found no significant relationship between race and the tendency to inflict multiple acts of violence, while black homicide arrestees were significantly more likely to have prior arrest records than white homicide arrestees (Wolfgang, 1958:160, 175-6). Therefore, there is little evidence that would indicate that killings committed by blacks are significantly less likely to be capital murders than those committed by

whites.

There is another potential source of bias peculiar to the use of victim data by race as a surrogate for offender data by race. It was assumed that the number of offenders of one race would be roughly equal to the number of victims of that race. This assumption could be substantially incorrect, if, for example, killings involving black victims and white killers were more numerous than killings with white victims and black killers. If such were the case, the number of black victims would overestimate the number of black killers relative to white killers, and therefore underestimate the black execution rate relative to the white execution rate. Data relevant to this question are contained in the 1976 Uniform Crime Reports, which reported offender-victim racial relationships for murders and non negligent manslaughters (U.S. F.B.I., 1977). These data indicate that black offender-white victim killings are more numerous than white offender black victim killings. They further indicate that while only 53.2% of the 10,538 homicide victims were black, 55.8% of the known offenders were black. This finding suggests that use of victim data by race involves a bias whose correction would only strengthen our findings. Similar conclusions on victim-offender racial relationships could be drawn from data reported in smaller scale studies of criminal homicide (Garfunkel, 1949:371; Wolfgang, 1958:379; Bensing and Schroeder, 1960:51; and the seventeen-city study of Curtis, 1974:21).

Death-Sentencing Rates Execution rates, as we have measured them, reflect not only rates at which defendants are sentenced to death, but also the extent to which such sentences are successfully appealed or commuted to a lesser penalty. Therefore, a purer measure of the rate at which defendants are sentenced to death is desirable. Annual data on the number of persons sentenced to die has been compiled, by race of the offender, for the United States since 1967.

While this does not allow computation of death-sentencing rates for a very long period of time, it does update our analysis by providing information on the administration of capital punishment since the de facto moratorium on executions began in 1967. Death-sentencing rates were first computed in a fashion similar to the computation of execution rates: the number of death sentences (actually, persons received by U.S. prisons from the courts, sentence of death) for murder is compared with the number of homicides in the previous year, for each race. Then a second measure of the death-sentencing rate was computed. It could be argued that a better measure of the risk of receiving a death sentence would use persons arrested for, or convicted of, capital crimes as the base for the rate, since it is only such persons who are actually at risk of receiving a death sentence. While there are no national data on convictions for murder, there are national figures on persons arrested for murder or non-negligent manslaughter. Therefore, rates were computed using these figures for the base of the death-sentencing rate, again in a manner similar to the computation of execution rates.

Table 6 shows the computation of death-sentencing rates. The resulting rates, whether based on homicide deaths or homicide arrests, indicate that nonwhites were subject to a lower risk of being sentenced to death than whites over the period from 1967 to 1978. Because of the small numbers of death sentences each year, rates for single years are somewhat unstable, especially for 1972 and 1973. Nevertheless, the findings are on the whole quite consistent with the findings for execution rates.

This aggregate-level analysis does not show that there is never overt racial discrimination in the administration of the death penalty for murder outside of the South. There may be discrimination in particular jurisdictions, in specific individual cases, or at specific, previously unstudied, stages in the legal process leading up to execution, although a close reading of previous studies of various stages in this process, such as arrest, indicate that, at least outside the South, overt racial discrimination may be more apparent than real, just as seems to be the case with sentencing (regarding arrest, see Green, 1970; Black, 1971; Monahan, 1972; Lundman et al., 1978).

What the present analysis does show is that regardless of whatever discrimination there may or may not be at particular stages in the legal process, the outcome is a lower execution rate for blacks than for whites. If there is discrimination against blacks at one or more stages, then, given the observed net result, it seems that there must also be some compensating effects, favoring blacks, at other stages.10 Likewise, if there is discrimination against blacks in one or more regions, jurisdictions, or specific cases, or with particular subtypes of homicides, then there must be some counterbalancing effects elsewhere.

The simple computation of execution and death-sentencing rates obviously does not in any way control for differences in prior criminal record (or other legally relevant variables, for that matter). Considering the stress laid on controlling for prior record earlier in the paper, this omission might seem to undercut confidence in the death penalty findings. However, because introduction of such controls has consistently reduced differences in sentencing outcome attributable to racial discrimination, correcting this omission would only tend to strengthen the conclusion of no overt discriminatory effect of homicide offenders’ racial identity. In connection with capital punishment of rape, controlling for prior criminal record would reduce the apparent discriminatory effect to some degree, but this effect is so large to begin with that it is doubtful if the conclusion of discrimination would have to be altered.

10 This possibility of a pattern of compensating discriminatory effects has been raised by Nagel and Neef (1977:185-8).

Table 6. Death-Sentencing Rates by Race, 1967-1978

Year Nonwhite White Ratio: Nonwhite/White Sentences per 1,000 Homicide Deaths a

1978 74/ 9,230 = 8.02 108/ 10,730 = 10.07 0.80

1977 64/ 9,439= 6.78 68/ 10,115= 6.72 1.01

1976 88/ 10,377 = 9.51 136/ 10,973 = 12.39 0.69

1975 143/ 10,817 = 13.22 121/ 10,648= 11.36 1.16

1974 65/ 10,291 = 6.32 67/ 9,789 = 6.84 0.92

1973 23/ 10,498 = 2.19 11/ 8,840 = 1.24 1.76

1972 40/ 10,226 = 3.91 26/ 8,561 = 3.04 1.29

1971 51/ 9,045 = 5.64 45/ 7,803 = 5.77 0.98

1970 52/ 8,461 = 6.15 64/ 7,016 = 9.12 0.67

1969 36/ 7,880 = 4.57 49/ 6,806 = 7.20 0.63

1968 45/ 7,027= 6.40 51/ 6,009= 8.49 0.75

1967 38/ 6,077 = 6.25 36/ 5,230 = 6.88 0.91

1967-78 719/109,328= 6.58 782/102,529= 7.63 0.86

Sentences per 1,000 Homicide Arrests

1978 74/ 9,256 = 7.99 108/ 7,866 = 13.73 0.58

1977 64/ 7,083 = 9.03 68/ 5,792 = 11.74 0.77

1976 88/ 8,592 = 10.24 136/ 6,581 = 20.67 0.50

1975 143/ 7,567 = 18.90 121/ 4,879 = 24.71 0.76

1974 65/ 7,677 = 8.74 67/ 5,236 = 12.80 0.66

1973 23/ 8,661 = 2.66 11/ 5,145 = 2.14 1.24

1972 40/ 8,586 = 4.66 26/ 4,716 = 5.51 0.85

1971 51/ 7,344 = 6.94 45/ 4,503 = 9.99 0.69

1970 52/ 6,669 = 7.79 64/ 3,743 = 17.10 0.46

1969 36/ 5,922 = 6.08 49/ 3,536 = 13.86 0.44

1968 45/ 5,018 = 8.97 51/ 3,200 = 15.94 0.56

1967 38/ 4,203 = 9.04 36/ 2,911 = 12.37 0.73

1967-78 719/ 86,578 = 8.30 782/ 58,126 = 13.45 0.62

Sources: Persons sentenced to death: U.S., NCJISS, Capital Punishment (1971-72; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1976; 1977; 1978).

Homicide deaths, 1966-76: U.S., NCHS, Vital Statistics of the United States: Mortality (Year) (1968-79).

Homicide deaths, 1977: U.S. NCHS, Monthly Vital Statistics Report: Advance Report: Final Mortality Statistics 1977 (1979).

Arrests, 1966-77: U.S., F.B.I., Crime in the United States (Year) (1967-1978).

A. Death sentences for murder, year t, per 1,000 homicide deaths, year t- 1.

B. Death sentences for murder, year t, per 1,000 homicide arrests, year t- 1.

Conclusions

The conclusions which can be drawn from the available evidence on the racial patterning of sentencing may be briefly summarized as follows:

(1) The death penalty has not generally been imposed for murder in a fashion discriminatory toward blacks, except in the South. Elsewhere, black homicide offenders have been less likely to receive a death sentence or be executed than whites.

(2) For the 11% of executions which have been imposed for rape, discrimination against black defendants who had raped white victims was substantial. Such discrimination was limited to the South and has disappeared because death sentences are no longer imposed for rape.

(3) Regarding noncapital sentencing, the evidence is largely contrary to a hypothesis of general or widespread overt discrimination against black defendants, although there is evidence of discrimination for a minority of specific jurisdictions, judges, crime types, etc.

(4) Although black offender-white victim crimes are generally punished more severely than crimes involving other racial combinations, the evidence indicates that-his is due to legally relevant factors related to such offenses, not the racial combination itself.

(5) There appears to be a general pattern of less severe punishment of crimes with black victims than those with white victims, especially in connection with imposition of the death penalty. In connection with noncapital sentencing, the evidence is too sparse to draw any firm conclusions.

None of these findings are inconsistent with the assertion of institutional racism or income discrimination in sentencing. It is quite possible that low income makes it more difficult to make bail, hire a private attorney genuinely independent of the court, etc., for both blacks and whites, and that these factors in turn result in more severe sentencing outcomes, as Lizotte’s (1978) research indicates-” If black criminal defendants are poorer than white criminal defendants, then income discrimination would produce racial differentials in sentences received. Nor are the data inconsistent with a hypothesis of overt discrimination at earlier stages of the criminal justice process. We might expect violations of stated values such as equal protection and justice for all to occur most commonly in connection with the least visible decisions, such as the decision to arrest, charge, prosecute, or release a defendant on bail (e.g., see Hagan, 1975 on the decision to charge). However, these decisions are less well studied than the sentencing decision, so the evidence for discrimination is necessarily even weaker than that regarding sentencing, quite apart from the actual prevalence of discriminatory practice.

The findings of this study do not suggest a different explanation for a well-known phenomenon. Rather they point to a phenomenon to be explained which differs from that conventionally addressed by American students of the legal reaction to crime and criminals. Students of the criminal justice system, concerned with the contemporary consequences of a historical pattern of racism, have sought to explain patterns of more severe treatment of blacks, while overlooking or downplaying  the pattern of more lenient treatment of black defendants.

Blacks in the United States, both in the recent and more remote past, have been less likely than whites to receive a death sentence if they committed a homicide. Furthermore, this pattern is apparently not entirely limited to the sentencing of capital offenders. For a variety of specific crimes, jurisdictions, and judges, various researchers have produced data indicating more lenient treatment of black defendants than whites, although the admittedly scattered findings were usually deemphasized or discounted as merely anomalous results attributable to some flaw in the analysis or research design.12 For example, Bullock (1961) found significantly shorter prison sentences were assigned to blacks convicted of murder; Levin’s (1972) Pittsburgh data indicate that blacks received more lenient dispositions than whites for eight out of nine offense categories; and Bernstein and her colleagues (1977) found that blacks received significantly less severe sentences than whites. Gibson (1978:469) studied sentences given by individual judges and found that seven of eleven judges gave a higher percentage of severe sentences to whites than to blacks.

” It is interesting that Lizotte’s path-analysis findings indicate that defendant’s race affects whether the defendant makes bail (which in turn affects sentence), but that it does not affect the bail amount set. This suggests that there is no overt racial discrimination in bail setting, but that there are income discriminations. Nice Lizotte had no measure of defendant’s income, it is possible that the race effect was found simply because the race variable was serving as a rough surrogate for defendant income.

12 This may be one of the more important subsidiary findings of the literature review. It is a chronic problem in this area, and perhaps in sociology as a whole, that researchers fail to recognize the significance of anomalies, which should alert them to the possible need for alterations in their fundamental assumptions rather than just their methods (See Kuhn, 1962: Ch. VI on this issue).

The specification of phenomena to be explained is in a way a more fundamental scientific task than the development of explanations, since the former obviously must occur before the latter can even be imagined. The pattern of lenient treatment of black defendants in the South was recognized in the 1940s and before by observers such as Dollard (1937) and Myrdal ([1944] 1972), and various explanations were developed to account for it. Today, however, this phenomenon is largely disregarded.

A number of factors which may help account for this pattern can be briefly outlined.

(1) Blacks as devalued crime victims. Perhaps the most plausible explanation of lenient treatment of black offenders who commit predominantly interracial crimes such as homicides, assaults, and rapes is that crimes with black victims are considered by predominantly white social control agents to be less serious offenses, representing less loss or threat to the community than crimes with white victims (Myrdal, [1944] 1972:551). Thus, paradoxically, racist sentiments would produce more favorable treatment for members of the subordinate racial group who commit interracial crimes.

(2) White paternalism. Students of criminal justice in the South have suggested a widespread view among whites of blacks as child-like creatures who were not as responsible for their actions as whites were, and who therefore could not be held accountable to the law to the extent that whites are (Dollard, 1937; Myrdal, [1944] 1972; Garfunkel, 1949). Therefore their perceived diminished responsibility presumably earned them more lenient sentences.

(3) Sociology-based tolerance. White paternalism may account for Southern sentencing patterns of the past but not patterns in the rest of the country in more recent times. However, it may have been replaced by a new form of white tolerance for black crime, involving the following line of reasoning: “Blacks commit crimes because of poverty, racism, and/or the resulting black poverty-subculture, which accepts or encourages criminal behavior. Their crimes are due to forces beyond their control or at least are to be expected in this light. Therefore blacks should not be held as responsible for their actions as whites.” Of course, this is largely speculative; however, criminal court informants questioned by Bernstein and her colleagues (1977:753) stated that “some judges and prosecutors assume that nonwhites commit crimes because the nonwhite subculture accepts such behavior. These subcultural differences are considered by the judges and prosecutors, thereby making the offenses of nonwhites seem less pernicious.”

(4) Affirmative action in the courts. White guilt over acknowledged past discrimination could motivate liberal criminal-justice decision makers to consciously or unconsciously compensate with more lenient treatment of black defendants.

(5) Compensation for institutional racism. Recognizing the handicaps of low income and greater prior criminal records which black defendants bring into court, some decision makers may attempt to compensate in determining sentence.

(6) Compensation for unconscious prejudice. Johnston et al. (1973) conducted a study involving criminal court judges sentencing hypothetical defendants and found that the hypothetical white “defendants” were sentenced more severely than the black “defendants.” Two of the judges who participated in the study explained that they consciously sought to compensate in their sentencing for any unconscious prejudice on their part against minorities (p. 870).

Various combinations of these explanations can be used to account for less severe sentencing of blacks when and where it has occurred. Factors (1) and (2) may be primarily responsible for lenient sentencing in interracial cases in the South in the 1940s and before, while different combinations of factors (3) through (6) account for leniency when it occurs elsewhere today and in the relatively recent past say, since the late 1960s. Only future research designed to test the hypotheses can determine which of these are more than merely plausible and actually produce the patterns observed.

The findings of this paper should not be interpreted as being incompatible with conflict, critical, or Marxist approaches to law, but rather only with the more simplistic, instrumentalist versions of these perspectives, which heavily stress the failure of the criminal justice system to operate according to its own stated standards of equity and proper procedure (e.g. Quinney, 1974; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971). In contrast, Beirne (1979) has pointed out the partial autonomy from particular social classes which the legal system enjoys, and has stated that “The capitalist class as a whole cannot be well served by frequent and visible abuses of due process” (p. 379). The criminal justice system can routinely operate to further legitimate the existing order through obedience to its own rules and limits to its power, even when overt class or race bias in specific situations would otherwise aid particular segments of the ruling class. Clearly then, a more intellectually mature version of conflict theory would not necessarily predict overt class or race bias in the allocation of penalties among criminal defendants.

However, there are forms of class bias in the legal systems which are not so clearly a threat to the legitimacy of the system. For example, the American legal system openly permits differing economic resources to be used in mounting a criminal defense, and such differences render legal advantages in avoiding conviction or obtaining lenient sentences if convicted, even though the advantages may operate indirectly and may involve no intentional prejudice on the part of any system decision maker. Lizotte (1978) has demonstrated how criminal sentence is affected by whether the defendant made bail and by the type of attorney the defendant had (private attorneys who were not courtroom regulars were more successful in negotiating light sentences than other types). While Lizotte had no measure of income, these are both clearly advantages more available to defendants with greater income. If equal protection of the law is a commodity which must be purchased, then this “equality” cannot be anything more than a legal fiction as long as the resources for such a purchase are distributed in an unequal fashion.

Serious though this economic or income discrimination in court processing may be, there is a far more fundamental bias in criminal sentencing. No studies of court processing of criminal defendants can address the issue of how legislatures criminalize behaviors common to lower-class persons, while either failing to criminalize or assigning slight penalties to equally harmful behaviors common among middle- or upper-class persons, such as poisoning of the air and water, manufacture of food, drugs, and other products harmful to human health, price-fixing, and consumer fraud. Detailed study of the use of wealth and power in controlling the ideological composition of legislatures and enforcement agencies, thereby influencing selection of behaviors to be criminalized, the original setting of penalty ranges, the determination of enforcement priorities, and allocation of enforcement resources, is likely to reveal far more about why blacks and lower-class persons are overrepresented in arrest, court, and prison data than studies of processing within the criminal justice system. The focus on the influence of ascribed characteristics of individual criminal defendants on processing decisions has, at least up to now, failed to yield the empirical support which would justify the attention that continues to be lavished on the subject.

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Myers, Martha A. 1979 “Offended parties and official reactions: victims and the sentencing of criminal defendants.” Sociological Quarterly 20:529-40.

Myrdal, Gunnar [1944]. An American Dilemma. New York: Pan- 1972 theon.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 1971 “Legal defense fund brief for Aikens 1971.” Cited on p. 71 in William J. Bowers (ed.), Executions in America. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath.

Discrimination Overview

With the progression of time strong racial ideologies began to form along with strenuous relationships between racial groups of all kinds.  The struggle for dominance as well as the fear of economic, political, and social growth led to the oppression of minorities particularly blacks. By enforcing legislation such as the Jim Crows laws, poll tax, The Grandfather Clause and etc. whites were able to discourage minorities from practicing their civil liberties granted by the Constitution in addition strictly denying their civil rights. Although prejudice against African Americans is the most noted example of discrimination in America, our nation has fell victim to several discriminatory periods dating  from the late 18th century to mid 20th century. Each period concerned several groups including women, blacks, American Indians, Latinos and more recently the homisiexual/bisexual community. Discrimination fueled by the familiar stereotypes associated with minority groups led demands of  a society purification, in which only citizens (men) could partake in the benefit of society. Signifying that they would allow minorities to be a part of society as base for entertainment and labor weren’t compelled or inclined to ever include them as equals. This is evident all throughout the records of the southern states’ use of Jim Crow laws and the supreme court ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson.

Constant  discrimination eventually ended due to the pressure from groups upon public officials and politicians to recognize the of discrepancies and injustices of selective  federal and state legislation. As a nation we cannot grow collectively if only one or two groups are exercising  upward mobility, as a result that group will have to make up for the lack of productivity of the remaining groups. However, some people have come to few the institution of Affirmative Action as “reverse discrimination” because it favors minorities more dircetly and takes away opportunites from others. I don’t view that idea as a free statement because the idea behind Affirmative Action is to counterblalnce the ast and unlawful amounts of discrimination that minorities had to suffer for over an extended period of time.

Racism and the English Language

By: Kathy Henry

Words are probably the most potent weapon to exist in society. A derogatory statement about an individual can ruin his or her life and the meaning of words can be twisted to accommodate any situation. One of the main reasons racism has existed in this society is because language conveys reality as well as reflects it. If a society is inherently racist, it is natural for the language that is spoken to reflect that racism. The articles by Moore and Churchill discuss how words are used to dehumanize certain ethnic group by making these groups seem subhuman. In using language to make “others” seem less than, society is justified in believing that these groups do not deserve the rights and privileges of the dominant culture. These articles and the other previous articles that I have read convey that racism is a socially constructed idea and was setup for the advancement of Whites and the exclusion of other ethnicities.

Moore’s “Racism in the English Language,” explores the way language influences Western thought from the first moment language is learned. The English language is peppered with racial stereotypes and slurs, even in words and phrases that seem quite harmless. He shows how these words are not harmless but are used to inflict oppression and feelings of inferiority to anyone considered “different” to American culture. Words such as “nigger,” “kike,” and “chink” have been used to label African-Americans, Jews, and Asian-Americans and although it is politically incorrect to use these words, the words and its derogatory meanings have been seared into the consciousness of White America, some who do not see anything wrong with saying these words. Even the names of colors such as “Black” and “White” have been used to promote racism. The color, “Black” means “dirty, defiled” and beyond redemption,” while White is “pure, clean, filled with innocence.” These words and their meanings have led to people who have internalized these beliefs and suffer from either delusions of grandeur or feelings of self-hatred. The author of this article feels that recognizing that racism exist in language is the first step in admitting racism still exists in this society and that people should make a conscious effort to use language that is not derogatory towards people based on ethnicity.

Similarly, Churchill’s, “Crimes against Humanity” makes a powerful thesis, stating that in disrespecting Native Americans by using native names, images, and symbols as team mascots, their place in society has been marginalized and degraded. He states with exquisite sarcasm that if the practice of using Native American images and symbols as team mascots continue, there should be teams named the Galveston “Greasers” and the San Diego “Spics.” Since the using native symbols for sports are not considered to be disrespectful by the dominant culture, this same culture should use other ethnicities as symbols since it is all in the name of fun. He further states that the genocide and degradation of Native Americans is comparable to the Jewish Holocaust and that the United States should be charged with crimes against humanity. In reducing the experiences of Native Americans to mere stereotypes, White society has succeeded in making Native Americans “unreal” to other groups, who passively accept the bigoted views of Native Americans. In both of these articles, the message is that words are used to dominate and oppress anyone who is not born White in this country and keep the status quo in charge. American society loves to label people.

Everyone has to be labeled something: whores, dikes, and niggers. I have been labeled a delinquent teenage mother, welfare recipient and a scourge to society. For many years I believed in these labels and sunk deeper and deeper into the hell that is called low self-esteem until I went to college and found out that I was intelligent and was worthy of respect. Some individuals are not as fortunate as I was and still believe in those labels that society has placed upon them. Sometimes I wonder what American society would do if there were not any labels. Take away the pretensions, the feelings of superiority that comes with having the “right” skin color and some people in this society would be loss. These types of individuals need to feel superior to other people in order to make themselves feel better. I hope that the day when labels are not needed will be sooner than later.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathy_Henry

From Past to Present

Race relationships tend to lean more towards the “black to white” relationships more than any other in terms of racial stereotypes. This may be due to the fact that of all minorities African Americans have been here the longest with the exception of the American Indian.

Most of the racial mockery cartoons are used today’s society are found in political magazines. Particularly since minority politicians such as the formed Secretary of State Condoleza Rice and our current President Barack Obama have become the pinnacles of the African American race in addition to being the most recognized minority public officials.

Although the representation of these stereotypes have changed over the past few centuries and decades their main objective is in essence the same. These cartoons and depictions were created not only as a comic outlet but also as a example of how many minorities are viewed in the eyes of white society. Even with more free thought in our culture today there are still the underlying ideas of what it means to be Asian, or Black, or Latino, or Native American and even white. Since the reconstruction time period we as a society, have fought to define what it means to be an American. The question now is just who is doing the defining?

 

 

Harmless Stereotypes

Beginning of Stereotypes

Racial stereotypes were created to represent  minorities in a fashion that was both comical and related to the surroundings that they most commonly associated with. It also served as platform for propaganda and the perception of many minority groups to the general public. It goes without saying that during the Reconstruction time period after the defeat of the south in the Civil War, blacks were least  favored ethnic group, around the mid 1920s is was the Mexican immigrants who were unpopular and today Muslims are the least favored ethnic within society. So as a way to sort of ease some of the hostile tensions during these time periods popular journalists, cartoonist, and etc. create illustrations that depict certain minority sets as either having a certain look or moral code, vernacular or combination of any of those things to entertain the “masses” generally white consumers. Stereotypes over time have made many changes but their essence still remain the same. A stereotype by definition  is “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group.” In lamens terms it is a generalized image that is used to represent a group of people. Most racial stereotypes created in popular culture today are generated from through media coverage of celebrated people who are members of certain cultural groups. The media uses the images of that person and/or their ideals to represent that particular ethnic group as a whole. The earliest type of illustrations that were used as stereotypical portraits were cartoon illustration that mocked minorities. These illustrations would depict Mexican as squishy faced brown men, with ridiculously large hats, sweat beading all around their face and large teeth, African American a tar  black people that resembled primates, most of the women fat and  were drawn with scarves around their hair or the hair drawn on them looked matted, their lips would be bright and the wore goofy looking smiles on their faces. Asians were drawn as pinched faced people with their hair pulled back very tightly and their eyes heavily slanted almost looked shut and some had buck teeth. The list continues of all the offensive descriptions of these illustration is extravagant and considered to most examples of racist propaganda and corruption due to the fact that the majority of those drawings and cartoons were targeted to children. Today of course those stereotypes no longer exist in terms of Mexican, black, and Asian people. Instead new stereotypes have taken there place and brought along with them an entire new set of cartoons, films, books, magazines, music, and etc. to mock.

Eugenic & Discrimination

The eugenics movement was not only an excuse to persecute minorities during the 1920s it also set the precedent for the many decades of racial discrimination that followed. As the movement began to receive bad press due to its unconstitutionality social elites began to their way of life as they had known it start to crumble and feared the over turn of their society by minorities who exhibited any form of potential. Thus minorities were placed in the type of roles that best suited the upper class persona. Such as encouraging participation in art, music, culinary arts, military service, factory work,agriculture and etc. in order to ensure their further enjoyment and prosperity. Minorities have continually been placed in areas of professional restriction. This keeps the wealth and simultaneously the power concentrated within one group predominately the whites. The 1965 adoption affirmative action policy has done a great deal to lesson the hindrance of minorities in today’s society, yet the discrepancies between the few who have created successful professional careers and those who still reside the below the poverty line is extensive.